I know perl and python is tested solution  for this kind of log parsing and data mining - 
Anybody have experience  dealing with syslog parsing with Java ?
I have to create a Java demon anyway to load the parsed output to DB .. 
So I was thinking why not going all the way - 
python might be useful when I will be running it on different environment.
I recently started writing python scripts, but recently i wrote a java gc log parser to print the timestamp when a gc happened and counts etc, and i found Python real easy in writing it. What kind of fields are you interested while parsing the syslogs? I think if you know what you are looking for in the logs(patterns etc) then it becomes easy to write a script which would do that for you.
Ankit.
Log parser solutions python/perl vs Java