Enterprise syslog management and alert generation.

Paul Jasa pjasa at univision.net
Wed Dec 8 06:02:27 UTC 2004


This is a topic near and dear to my heart.   I've been using SEC for a while now, been very happy with it.   If you like Perl and its regular expressions, SEC will do the trick.  It has a very complex log correlation capabilities, and multiple action methods, strongly recommend it especially if used with syslog-ng 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/simple-evcorr 
BTW, the README and instructions on how to set it up and all the options is extremely well-written and thorough, you'll like it.
pj

======================================
Paul 
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-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
Alexei Roudnev
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 12:52 AM
To: Bill Nash; nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: Enterprise syslog management and alert generation.



In such products, only 20% value is in engine; 80% are in rules, because I
can not wrire rules myself - I have not event until it happen, and I can not
filetr out noice until it happen.

We use a few syslog analyzers (using syslog-ng as a transport), some with
simple logcheck, other with database for rules and hosts; and every time
problem is the same - writing rules is 90% of the problem.

But... do you have rules, such as fort example _send alert if any system
began to generate 10 times logs / hour more vs. average? Or saying _single
PCI ERROR on Solaris - ignore, 10 in a straight line - send warning...




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Nash" <billn at billn.net>
To: <nanog at merit.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004 12:48 PM
Subject: Enterprise syslog management and alert generation.


>
>
> Some people call this 'Netcool' or products of a similiar stripe. I'm
> ramping up a project to rebuild some previous work done on this front with
> an open source distribution in mind (those of you on the syslog-ng list
> have seen mention of it), so I'm fishing for requirements I may not have
> already covered.
>
> I currently have:
> Perl regexp engine for applied rules.
> Tokenization and extraction of data from inbound syslog data.
> Assigning (single|multiple) customized event handlers to rule matches
> Ability to run multiple analyzers concurrently
> Optional linear rule application versus weighted optimization
> SQL storage of rules for centralized management and redistribution.
> Fully customized alert generation.
>
> My current production implementation has handled over 20 gigs a day, at
> peak, on a single analyzer (dual amd 2800+), using syslog-ng as a
> transport mechanism (forked socket transport with local disk logging for
> backup).
>
> Every network is different, as are particular requirements. Who's got wish
> lists? I personally wouldn't mind an on-list discussion about this, as it
> applies to standard operations toolsets, but if that's not kosher, feel
> free to contact me off-list.
>
> - billn


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