For this article, I’ll be focusing on syslog-ng as this is more up to date, and if the reader wishes, can be ‘supported’ via the company that owns the syslog-ng software by going with their enterprise edition version at a later date.

via Creating a Centralized Syslog Server | Linux Journal.

This is a good tutorial to get going with syslog-ng.  Monitoring events being logged into syslog can provide ample warning when a server is about to die.