Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your SYSLOG file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert SYSLOG to another file type
To convert your SYSLOG file to another format, you need Syslog-ng or other System software.
Convert a file to SYSLOG
To convert other file formats to the "Log File" file type, you need software like Syslog-ng or a similar tool.
About SYSLOG files
A .syslog file is a catch-all container for system event records, but it is not a standardized file format. While the term refers to the ubiquitous Syslog protocol used by Unix-based systems and network devices (routers, firewalls) to transport event messages, the actual file found on your disk can vary wildly. In nearly half of observed cases, a .syslog file is actually a compressed archive (specifically 7-Zip or GZIP) containing rotated log history to save disk space. In other scenarios, it is a proprietary database created by tools like SnmpSoft Syslog Watcher (which uses SQLite), or simply a raw text file renamed with a non-standard extension. This inconsistency is a common source of difficulty: trying to open a compressed or database-based .syslog file in a standard text editor like Notepad++ often results in unreadable binary garbage or encoding errors. To make the data useful, you typically need to convert or extract the file based on its internal structure. For analysis and filtering, converting text-based logs to CSV or Excel (XLSX) is ideal, allowing you to sort by timestamp, severity, and host. For archiving or sharing incident reports, converting to PDF ensures the formatting remains fixed. If the file is a compressed archive, it must first be extracted to access the underlying LOG or TXT files.
Convert.Guru analyzes your SYSLOG file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert SYSLOG file to JSON, CEF or CSV, you can use Syslog-ng or similar software from the "System Event Logging" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert files to SYSLOG, try Syslog-ng or another comparable tool in the "System Event Logging" category.
The SYSLOG Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our SYSLOG converter.