How to change the Splunk Forwarder Formatting of my Logs? - splunk

Question

I am using our Enterprise's Splunk forawarder which seems to be logging events in splunk like this which makes reading splunk logs a bit difficult.
{"log":"[https-jsse-nio-8443-exec-5] 19 Jan 2021 15:30:57,237+0000 UTC INFO rdt.damien.services.CaseServiceImpl CaseServiceImpl :: showCase :: Case Created \n","stream":"stdout","time":"2021-01-19T15:30:57.24005568Z"}
However, there are different Orgs in our Sibling Enterprise who log splunks thus which is far more readable. (No relation between us and them in tech so not able to leverage their tech support to triage this)
[http-nio-8443-exec-7] 15 Jan 2021 21:08:49,511+0000 INFO DaoOImpl [{applicationSystemCode=dao-app, userId=ANONYMOUS, webAnalyticsCorrelationId=|}]: This is a sample log
Please note the difference in logs (mine vs other):
{"log":"[https-jsse-nio-8443-exec-5]..
vs
[http-nio-8443-exec-7]...
Our Enterprise team is struggling to determine what causes this. I checked my app.log which looks ok (logged using Log4J) and doesn't have the aforementioned {"log" :...} entry.
[https-jsse-nio-8443-exec-5] 19 Jan 2021 15:30:57,237+0000 UTC INFO
rdt.damien.services.CaseServiceImpl CaseServiceImpl:: showCase :: Case
Created
Could someone guide me as to where could the problem/configuration lie that is causing the Splunk Forwarder to send the logs with the {"log":... format to splunk? I thought it was something to do with JSON type vs RAW which I too dont understand if its the cause and if it is - what configs are driving that?

Answer 1

Over the course of investigation - I found that is not SPLUNK thats doing this but rather the docker container. The docker container defaults to json-file that writes the outputs to the /var/lib/docker/containers folder with the **-json postfix which contains the logs in the `{"log" : <EVENT NAME} format.
I need to figure out how to fix the docker logging (aka the docker logging driver) to write in a non-json format.