EventSentry v3.3 Part 2: Event annotation, Filter Chaining, RegEx and more

In my previous post I talked about our new NetFlow component as well as the new agent management capabilities now available in EventSentry v3.3. In this post I’ll cover the remaining new features and improvements we’ve made in v3.3, starting with the web reports.

Web Reports
There are a number of new features and improvements in addition to NetFlow visualization. There are a few new dashboard tiles, including a “Recent Activity” tile which – as the name implies – shows recent relevant changes such as newly detected processes, software (un)installed, ping status or service status changes.

Viewing recent activity on the dashboard
Viewing recent activity on the dashboard

Anybody who works in a team of two or more Sysadmins should find the new notes feature incredibly helpful. It lets any web reports user add comments (=notes) which are subsequently visible to others. Notes can be associated with one or more hosts (ensuring they show up in the “Documentation” tab of the respective host status page) and can include documents as attachments as well! Do you have warranty documents or network diagrams you want to store in a central place – easily accessible? That’s what the notes are for.

Adding a note to the web reports
Adding a note to the web reports

The overall look and feel has also been refreshed, and we’ve reorganized the menu to make it faster to access dashboards and easier to find pages.

The visualization of data has been improved, since some chart types work better with certain features of EventSentry. You can now visualize grouped data using either pie charts, tree maps or column charts.

The security of the web reports has also improved with a lockout policy which will locking an account after too many unsuccessful logon events.

Monitoring Improvements
As mentioned in part 1, the EventSentry is agent is now available in 64-bit, making it possible to monitor 64-bit counters and easier to monitor files in 64-bit directories. For users upgrading from an earlier version, the EventSentry management console will automatically migrate any existing 32-bit agents on 64-bit versions of Windows.

Application & Services Event Logs
While monitoring Application & Services event logs, often referred to as “custom” event logs was possible, the way this needed to be configured in the management console was a common source of confusion. Some users also needed the ability to monitor more than 30 different logs. Consequently, monitoring additional event logs is now straightforward, and users can monitor as many event logs as they wish.

Filter Chaining
With thresholds, timers, schedules, insertion strings, EventSentry already offers a sophisticated engine for monitoring events in real time. New in this release is the ability to setup filter chaining. This makes it possible to trigger actions only when 2 or more events occur, and you can even link events together using insertion strings. Chaining is enabled on the package level, and every filter in a “chaining” package is automatically part of the filter chaining rules.

Event Annotation
It happens frequently that we get alerts that require us to do additional research based on the information provided in the alert. For example, we may get an alert about an IP address for which we then need to do a reverse lookup or find the geoip location. Audit Success & Failure events from the security event log are another example, and often contain error codes and numbers which are not explained.

Green line shows reverse lookup, blue line geo location
Green line shows reverse lookup, blue line geo location

We set out to improve upon this, and starting with v3.3 EventSentry will annotate email alerts in a number of ways whenever possible:

  • IP addresses will include a reverse lookup
  • IP addresses will include a geoip location
  • Security events will have various error codes resolved

Please note that (1) and (2) are only supported for emails sent through the collector since it requires access to a local geoip database. (1) and (2) will need to be enabled in the email action “Options”, (3) is automatically enabled for all emails.

Insertion Strings & Regex
By making insertion strings from events accessible in filters and actions (e.g. through the $STR1, $STR2, … variables), it’s possible to create highly granular thresholds, customize emails, easily trigger corrective actions which utilize content from events and more. Based on our own requirements we took this capability a step further however, and you can now apply regex filters to events to define your own insertion strings. This is particularly useful for alerts which don’t use insertion strings or for events which contain log data. For those types of events, you can now parse parts of log strings and assign them to insertion strings. The previous blog article, Detecting Web Server Scan in Real-Time, shows a practical example of how to apply this new feature. It does require you to be a bit familiar with Regular Expressions, but the management console includes a handy dialog where you can test your regular expressions, shown below.

Regex preview & test utility in management console
Regex preview & test utility in management console

Performance
Faster is better! We’ve improved performance in a number of areas:

  • The database insert performance of the Syslog daemon has been improved for Microsoft SQL Server databases
  • The delimited log file feature now includes an additional index to increase database insert performance
  • The heartbeat agent now relies less on RPC-based agent status monitoring and can instead obtain the status of a remote agent either directly from the collector or the database, resulting in less network traffic and faster heartbeat monitoring cycles.

With new features & improvements in a variety of areas, this release should contain improvements for everyone. Remember that you can also submit feature requests here.

EventSentry v3.3 Part 1: NetFlow, Easier Deployment & Laptop Monitoring

We are very excited to release EventSentry v3.3, a major update to our award-winning monitoring solution EventSentry, less than 10 months after the release of the previous major version 3.2. Version 3.2 included the collector component which supports secure and reliable communication with remote agents as well as better database throughput, switch port mapping and many improvements to the web reports.

I’d like to also thank everyone who took the time to fill out our annual survey – we read every single response in detail. If you haven’t taken it yet then you can still do so here.

The v3.3 release, which builds upon some of the architectural changes we have made in v3.2, and offers new functionality to help you:

  • Visualize, measure & investigate network traffic better with the new NetFlow component – with discounted introductory pricing until 12/31 2016!
  • Spend less time managing agents – the collector can now push configuration as well as agent updates automagically – think laptops!
  • Deployment via MSI is much easier – MSI file creation now only takes a few seconds
  • Investigate issues faster with email alerts which have geo location, reverse lookups as well complex security codes included inline
  • Visualize any data in the web reports more easily with additional dashboard tiles and treemaps throughout
  • Managing and using custom event logs is now more straightforward and scalable
  • Database throughput has been improved for Syslog data and delimited log files
  • Even more advanced filtering is possible with filter chaining and insertion string override via regular expressions
  • Communicating and documenting your network has just become a lot easier – add notes and/or upload documents in the web reports
  • Monitor 64-bit operating systems with a native 64-bit agent

With a brand new component and many new features in a variety of areas, v3.3 will have something of interest for everyone. Let’s dive in and look at the new features in more detail.

NetFlow
NetFlow is a new component which is part of the “Network Services” service (along with Syslog, SNMP, ARP) and is licensed separately. Pricing is very competitive and an additional introductory discount will be available until the end of this year, 12/31 – including competitive upgrades. You can request a quote here.

Collecting NetFlow data allows you to see all traffic meta data which passes through network devices that support NetFlow, including:

  • Source IP, destination IP
  • Source host, destination IP (when resolvable)
  • Source port, destination port
  • Geo location (when available)
  • IP protocol used
  • Amount of traffic sent and received
  • Number of packets transmitted
NetFlow Dashboard
Dashboard for NetFlow

EventSentry v3.3 currently supports the NetFlow v1, v5, v9 as well as sFlow flow protocols. NetFlow is usually supported by most commercial routers and firewalls whereas sFlow is most commonly supported by switches. NetFlow is generally preferable over sFlow – especially for forensic analysis since sFlow samples traffic and only sends every nth flow. sFlow can be preferable when dealing with large amounts of data, but EventSentry’s NetFlow implementation (as well as NetFlow itself) has a way to group flows and therefor condense traffic.

Do you need NetFlow, and is it worth looking into? Without NetFlow there is impossible to know which hosts communicate with each other (unless you capture network traffic). What traffic enters the network, and what traffic leaves it? Broadly speaking, implementing NetFlow lets you:

  • Visualize all network traffic in a variety of ways and reports
  • Analyze network data for forensic purposes
  • Utilize network traffic data for troubleshooting purposes
  • Map network traffic to geo location
  • Correlate network traffic with Active Directory users (requires workstation monitoring)
  • Measure bandwidth utilization
NetFlow Summary
NetFlow Summary

On the EventSentry side, setting up NetFlow should take less than 5 minutes; and setting it up on the network device side is generally just a matter of enabling NetFlow and pointing it to EventSentry.

Geo Location
EventSentry ships with the GeoLite geo database from MaxMind which does a good job of associating IP addresses with physical locations down to the city level. If you are looking for more accuracy however, then you can also purchase the full geo location database from MaxMind here.

Blocked ports by origin country
Blocked ports by origin country

Active Directory User Correlation
A unique feature of EventSentry’s NetFlow implementation is the ability to correlate workstation logins with network traffic, making it possible to associate network traffic with individual users. This requires that workstations are monitored with EventSentry and works best when users have a dedicated workstation.

Agent Management & Deployment
If you are utilizing the collector service then you have now a great time-saving feature available. Pushing a configuration update to remote hosts after you made a change or deploying agent updates after a patch installation are a thing of the past once you activate the respective options in the collector dialog.

Managing automatic configuration updates can be done in 2 ways: Either by automatically deploying a configuration update after you click “save”, or by deploying only approved configuration updates (recommended). If you select the latter, then you just have to click the new “Save & Deploy” sub-option on the ribbon and the collector will do the rest. It’s no longer necessary that the EventSentry agent is directly reachable from the management console; it will receive the latest configuration as soon as it connects to the collector.

Configuring Agent Management
Configuring Agent Management

Please note that you will still need to manually deploy a v3.3 agent once in order for automatic agent updates to work, since the self-update code is embedded in the new agents.

Creating MSI files has also been greatly simplified – a x86 and x64 agent MSI file is created with just a few mouse button clicks. Manually editing MSI files with tools like ORCA is a thing of the past. The only prerequisite is the (free) WiX Toolset which has to be installed only once.

Monitoring Laptops
In addition to saving most EventSentry users a lot of time, these new deployment features also make it possible to monitor laptops which aren’t permanently connected to the network. Simply deploy the agent MSI file with your favorite deployment tool (or deploy with the management console) and enable the configuration and agent management options in the collector. From that point on, any agent connecting to the collector will automatically receive the latest configuration AND any new agent updates – completely automatically – no matter where in the world they are located.

64-Bit Agents
EventSentry v3.3 now ships with both a x86 and x64 agent, so that 64-bit editions of Windows can be monitored natively. The key benefit of this change is that 64-bit only performance counters can now be monitored, these counters were off limit with 32-bit agents. Utilizing 64-bit agents also results in the following changes:

  • Agents will be automatically converted to 64-bit when v3.3 is deployed. It is not possible to use a 32-bit v3.3 agent on a 64-bit version of Windows
  • File system redirection via “Sysnative” or in the File Checksum Monitoring packages is no longer necessary
  • Memory consumption will be slightly higher compared with 32-bit agents

Please note that EventSentry has not completely migrated to 64-bit yet, some components (management console, heartbeat agent, web reports) are still shipped as 32 bit executables. We plan on migrating all components to 64-bit by the end of 2017.

There are just too many new features in v3.3 to fit them all into one blog post, so stay tuned for part 2 which will follow shortly.

Your NETIKUS.NET team.