Methods, program products, and systems implementing dynamic parsing rules are disclosed. Log data from a variety of log producers can be parsed using parsing rules to generate information about an information system. The parsing rules can include system parsing rules and custom parsing rules. A state machine can be used to detect conflicts between various parsing rules. A central server can distribute the system parsing rules and custom parsing rules to one or more remote servers for distributed processing. In a hierarchical parsing system, a first tier parser can be used to identify types of sources generating the log data. Log data from each type of log source can be sent to a second tier parser that corresponds to the type of log source.
