Merging Seq Forwarder into seqcli

[nblumhardt]

Seq Forwarder does its job - we're really happy with how the project has turned out, over the years, and we know a lot of customers rely on it for deploying Seq in tricky situations and unusual environments.

Unfortunately, because the project is "done" in many ways, we've been guilty of forgetting about it at times, and so it's behind some other Datalust projects in several ways: there's no official Docker image or dotnet tool, the test infrastructure doesn't support end-to-end scenarios, Seq's tracing features aren't supported, and various parts of the codebase or CLI would benefit from a refresh.

So, finally, we've decided on a plan: seq-forwarder will become the seqcli forwarder command group.

This is great on all kinds of levels:

• seqcli is published to Docker as datalust/seqcli
• seqcli is published as a dotnet tool
• seqcli is installed by default on Windows by the Seq .msi installer
• seqcli includes end-to-end test infrastructure that can spin up networks, processes, and Seq instances
• The configuration system in seqcli is more mature: on each build, for example, the complete CLI syntax is exported in Markdown, driving the datalust/seqcli project README
• seqcli already includes a stack of ingestion, filtering, and output features that seqcli forwarder will be able to take advantage of, in time

But most importantly, seqcli is better set up for contribution, and it's a much more active project. This should ensure new

In the short term we'll continue maintaining Seq Forwarder here, but once seqcli forwarder is ready for production use, we'll provide some migration instructions and shift this project into archive mode.

If you have any questions, ideas, concerns - or encouragement :-) - please feel free to chime in here!

[xantari]

Any updates on when this will be complete and support the OTLP data?

[KodrAus]

Hi @xantari. Thanks for the ping 👍 We were just talking about this the other day. We've been focusing on other things for most of this year, but will revisit this. We've got a branch over in seqcli with most of the groundwork laid: https://github.com/datalust/seqcli/tree/feature/forwarder/src/SeqCli/Forwarder but have some bigger issues to resolve in seqcli before we can finish it off that require some more dedicated attention.