On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 20:30, Jonathan Lassoff <jof@thejof.com> wrote:
On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 4:51 PM, Duane Toler <detoler@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey NANOG!
My employer is deploying CIsco ASA firewalls to our clients (specifically the 5505, 5510 for our smaller clients). We are having problems finding a decent log viewer. Several products seem to mean well, but they all fall short for various reasons. We primarily use Check Point firewalls, and for those of you with that experience, you know the SmartViewer Tracker is quite powerful. Is there anything close to the flexibility and filtering capabilities of Check Point's SmartView Tracker?
For now, I've been dumping the logs via syslog with TLS using syslog-ng to our server, but that is mediocre at best with varying degrees of reliability. The syslog-ng server then sends that to a perl script to put that into a database. That allows us to run our monthly reports, but that doesn't help us with live or historical log parsing and filtering (see above, re: SmartView Tracker).
It sounds like you've already got a pretty good aggregation setup going, here. I've had great luck with UDP Syslog from devices to a site-local log aggregator that then ships off log streams to a central place over TCP (for the WAN paths) and/or TLS/SSL. It sounds like you may have something similar going here, though I'd be curious to know where you've had this fall down reliability-wise.
We considered that, but didn't want to "burden" small customers with a classic scenario of "ok well you have to have our other box in your room" and have to deal with procurement, maintenance, upkeep, monitoring, blah blah. Recent ASA code (8.3-ish, 8.4? i forget) had syslog-tls built in and finally able to ship logs out across the lowest security zone, which was quite a nice addition. The break down is periodic log-reporting failures. After some indeterminate time, the device seems to just "give up" and just not send logs. Plus, it doesn't reconnect on a failure. I added a Nagios check to monitor the state of things, so now I get notified in this situation (or at least within a few minutes). When this does occur, I ssh to the ASA and have to run the 'no logging enable' and then 'logging enable' to "jump start" it again. Sometime that's not even enough and I have to remove the logging command for external syslog and re-add it again. It's very weird and quite spurious.
If a customer called to help us troubleshoot connection issues over the past few days, there's no way to review the logs and figure out what happened back then. Every CCIE we've talked to, and Cisco themselves, seem to not care about firewall traffic logs or the ability to parse and review them. We know about Cisco Security Center, but that seems incapable of handling logs, etc. CS-MARS would've been great, but that's overpriced and now discontinued anyway. We'd hate to spend the time writing our own app if there's a viable product already available (we're willing to pay a reasonable price for one, too).
I don't know of any great commercial products, as I've only built homegrown tools for various organizations. I'm curious though, what kinds of features are you looking for? Searching log data? Alerting on events based on log data? Cheers, jof
I'd like to fully search on an 'column', a la 'ladder logic' style., as well as have the data presented in an orderly well-defined fashion. I know that sounded like the beginnings of "use XML!" but oh dear, not XML, please. :) Poor syslog is just too flat and in a state of general disarray. The bizarre arrangement of connection setup, NAT, non-NAT, traffic destined to the device, originating from the device, traffic routing across the to another zone, etc. ... it's very nonsensical, verbose, and frankly maddening. Best I can tell, the whole thing doesn't make any sense (and was a bear to tease apart with regex). I've gotten a few suggestions to check out Splunk, so I'll toss that into the review pile and see how that works out. Thanks to the folks who suggested that! -- Duane Toler detoler@gmail.com