After reading your response, I realized that ring buffer was not what I wanted to use at all. I was not aware of the log backends. log backends was exactly what I wanted. I want to distribute syslog data across nodes, not duplicate. That was my mistake. Your solution was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for pointing that out. After switching to log backend I the backend stats show up again from /var/run/api.sock, perfect.
Curious, is there a reason why the bin and bout show 0 for all values when using log backend servers? I would think they should show aggregates of syslog bytes to each node, but they just stay at 0. I get that with mode tcp it would only show when a session ended, but I would think this would be showing me rates as logs are distributed. Is this expected?