thanks for the ideas otto.. unfortunately i have neither the access nor the authority to start modifying the syslog server itself since it's in production.. i'll have the server's architect take your suggestion into consideration, but it may cause regressive problems with other systems that rely on the way it's structured now (albeit i'll agree it isn't very well designed)...

as far as rrdtool, i've used it a bit.. it definitely makes nice graphs, but it has more of a numerical-analysis application rather than dealing with text parsing.. it's, at its core, a backend db for storing data in a fixed amount of spare, along with extensions to create graphs from the db you populated with (usually) numerical measurements, counters, and the like..