title: Adding fields to Cloudwatch without using JSON
body: <p>So I have typical run of the mill logs from Nginx and tomcat servers which are just single line text files with typical log format.  I have changed the tomcat access logs to output pipe delimited fields so I can easily process them using some unix scripts.  I'd like to get rid of my unix scripts and move to using cloudwatch to process my logs in a similar manner, however I found out that cloudwatch really doesn't understand anything beyond timestamp, message, and logstream by default.</p>
  
  <p>It will add fields using JSON, but JSON is verbose when it comes to log files.  I'd like to just let it process a CSV file which seems like an obvious alternative to JSON.  I'm willing to change my log format to meet a requirement like that, but I can't find any information about how I could do that.</p>
  
  <p>Is my only option to translate my logs into JSON in order to add fields to cloudwatch?  I am aware of the parse command, but I find that cumbersome to reconstitute my fields every time I want to build a query.  Especially since these will mostly be access logs which will have numerous fields.  I have aws cloudwatch log agent setup on my systems and I'm currently sending these logs to cloudwatch.</p>