Remove formatting from specific rsyslog configuration

Question

I'm building an application that will have quite a few moving parts. Some of them will be scheduled by cron, others are triggered by a service using inotify to listen for file arrivals.

Because I would like all logs to end up in a uniform format, I find myself needing to tell rsyslog that it should handle all logs from a specific programname without any additional formatting.

I have managed to achieve this easily on a Red Hat 7.3 machine running rsyslogd 7.4.7 using the following configuration:

$template rawFormat,"%rawmsg%\n"
if $programname == 'forwardit' then /var/log/forwardit.log;rawFormat
& stop

However, I now need to have the exact same configuration on a Debian Stretch machine, running rsyslogd 8.24.0 and it's not really working...

1) I tried just using the same configuration file. The result is that the logs lines do get sent to the right file, but it's not using the template:

<30>Oct  2 09:51:09 forwardit[24602]: {"task": "forward_file", "event": "Failed.", "timestamp": "2018-10-02T07:51:09.973558Z"}

Note the odd appearance of a <30> at the front, which is not present in my syslog...

2) I assumed that the old style template declarations simply weren't valid anymore, so I tried:

template (name="rawFormat" type="string" string="%rawmsg%\n")
if $programname == 'forwardit' then /var/log/forwardit.log;rawFormat
& stop

Same result.

3) Going forward in the same direction, I tried to update the application of the template:

template (name="rawFormat" type="string" string="%rawmsg%\n")
if $programname == 'forwardit' then action(type="omfile" File="/var/log/forwardit.log" Template="rawFormat")
& stop

And still no change in the actual output.

Here's the /etc/rsyslog.conf file:

#################
#### MODULES ####
#################

module(load="imuxsock") # provides support for local system logging
module(load="imklog")   # provides kernel logging support
#module(load="immark")  # provides --MARK-- message capability

# provides UDP syslog reception
#module(load="imudp")
#input(type="imudp" port="514")

# provides TCP syslog reception
#module(load="imtcp")
#input(type="imtcp" port="514")


###########################
#### GLOBAL DIRECTIVES ####
###########################

#
# Use traditional timestamp format.
# To enable high precision timestamps, comment out the following line.
#
$ActionFileDefaultTemplate RSYSLOG_TraditionalFileFormat

#
# Set the default permissions for all log files.
#
$FileOwner root
$FileGroup adm
$FileCreateMode 0640
$DirCreateMode 0755
$Umask 0022

#
# Where to place spool and state files
#
$WorkDirectory /var/spool/rsyslog

#
# Include all config files in /etc/rsyslog.d/
#
$IncludeConfig /etc/rsyslog.d/*.conf


###############
#### RULES ####
###############

#
# First some standard log files.  Log by facility.
#
auth,authpriv.*         /var/log/auth.log
*.*;auth,authpriv.none      -/var/log/syslog
#cron.*             /var/log/cron.log
daemon.*            -/var/log/daemon.log
kern.*              -/var/log/kern.log
lpr.*               -/var/log/lpr.log
mail.*              -/var/log/mail.log
user.*              -/var/log/user.log

#
# Logging for the mail system.  Split it up so that
# it is easy to write scripts to parse these files.
#
mail.info           -/var/log/mail.info
mail.warn           -/var/log/mail.warn
mail.err            /var/log/mail.err

#
# Some "catch-all" log files.
#
*.=debug;\
    auth,authpriv.none;\
    news.none;mail.none -/var/log/debug
*.=info;*.=notice;*.=warn;\
    auth,authpriv.none;\
    cron,daemon.none;\
    mail,news.none      -/var/log/messages

#
# Emergencies are sent to everybody logged in.
#
*.emerg             :omusrmsg:*

Answer 1

Alright, so after more digging I was looking at the available properties and found rawmsg-after-pri, which explains that the <30> I was seeing is what rsyslog calls the PRI.

This lead me to realize that probably, the actual content of rawmsg had changed between versions. So I changed the template to use msg instead and all is good.