Some services (nginx, buildbot, et cetera) only support logging to a file. Is there a way to reliably capture these log messages using syslog and friends, so that the log message can be reflected in the system logs and/or forwarded to a log service on another server?
Would it be feasible to create additional devices like /dev/log and point the service to log to those? In this case, would it be necessary to use some sort of wrapper in order for the service to open and write to /dev/log just like any other file?
Or would it be feasible for syslog to create a UNIX socket listener, and for a service to open and write to that just like any other file?
You can log anything that is written to a file. A while back, I wrote a blog post about logging from apache to syslog-ng.