I had missed it… finally guidance on how to collect and monitor UNIX syslog in System Center Operations Manager 2007 has been published!
This is much more sysadmin-oriented than what was availble before (that remais of course still relevant, but more from a Management Pack developer’s point of view, who wants to know how things work “behind the hood”).
If you want to rewrite syslog events with DNS lookups\descriptions, etc check out my guide here: http://windowsmasher.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/monitoring-esxi-syslogs-with-opsmgr-2007-r2/
Nice job there, John!
btw, some other technique to actually discover entities based on syslog messasges was shown a long time ago by Komal http://blogs.msdn.com/b/komal/archive/2007/10/05/syslog-module-enhanced.aspx altough it had the drawbacks of causing lot of config churn 🙂