🌌 Pulsar

High-performance synthetic event generator Generate realistic logs and network flows at scale up to 150000 events per second

⚠️ Pre-alpha software — not ready for production use. Breaking changes are expected.

Features

• Protocols: TCP, UDP
• Formats: NetFlow v5, Syslog (CEF)
• Lock-free pipeline engine: Zero-lock worker pools with atomic queues for sustained 150K+ EPS
• CLI-first: Optionla config files - everything tunable via flags or env vars. Perfect for scripts and CI
• Built-in observability: Metrics for throughput, drops, and latency out of the box

Known problems

• TCP connection pool is basic (no smart retries; errors on shutdown)
• Event types and data are hardcoded - no support for custom format
• Potential data loss on shutdown under high load (visible with -race flag)
• Incomplete metrics (network/processing stats not fully implemented)
• Suboptimal memory usage at high EPS (OOM risk on constrained systems)
• No build-time information (-v shows placeholder)

Usage

Run from source (for development)

go run ./cmd --help

Build and run binary

go build -o pulsar .
./pulsar -e netflow -p udp -r 100000 -d localhost:2055 -t 10m

Flags

Flag	Type	Description	Default
-c, --config	FILE	Configuration file path	-
-r, --rate	N	Events per second	10
-d, --destinations	LIST	Comma-separated destinations (now can work only with single)	127.0.0.1:514
-p, --protocol	PROTO	Protocol: tcp or udp	udp
-e, --events	TYPE	Events type: netflow or syslog	netflow
-t, --duration	TIME	How long to run (e.g., 30s, 5m, 1h)	0 (endless)
-l, --log-level	LEVEL	Log level: debug, info, warn, error	info
-v, --version	-	Show version information	-
-h, --help	-	Show this help	-

Docker

⚠️Wrk in progress docker-compose is just an exampl and not optimal. Public image and stable version coming soon.

You can run multiple generators via docker-compose.yml (netflow + syslog, as example)

Build and run both generators for 5 minutes:

docker-compose up --build

Send events to your destination instead of localhost:

TARGET_DESTINATION=siem.internal:2055 docker-compose up --build

Run only one generator (for example netflow):

docker-compose up --build pulsar-netflow

Issues

Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue!
Please include:

• Command you ran
• Expected vs actual behavior

Pre-alpha means bugs are expected — your report helps a lot!

Maintainer

This project was created and is maintained by Nikita Shabanov.