Splunk

Splunk: Ingests, indexes, and visualizes data for monitoring, analysis, and alerting.

To add a Splunk destination (Splunk Cloud or Splunk Enterprise) to Axoflow, complete the following steps.

Prerequisites

  1. Enable the HTTP Event Collector (HEC) on your Splunk deployment if needed. On Splunk Cloud Platform deployments, HEC is enabled by default.

  2. Create a token for Axoflow to use in the destination. When creating the token, use the syslog source type.

    For details, see Set up and use HTTP Event Collector in Splunk Web.

  3. If you’re using AxoRouter, create the indexes where Axoflow sends the log data. Which index is needed depends on the sources you have, but create at least the following event indices: axoflow, infraops, netops, netfw, osnix (for unclassified messages). Check your sources in the Sources section for a detailed lists on which indices their data is sent.

  4. If you’ve created any new indexes, make sure to add those indexes to the token’s Allowed Indexes.

Steps

  1. Create a new destination.

    1. Open the AxoConsole.
    2. Select Destinations > + Add Destination.

  2. Configure the destination.

    1. Select Splunk.

    2. Enter a name for the destination.

      Configure the Splunk destination

    3. Select which type of configuration you want to use:

      • Simple: Send all data into a single index, with fixed source and source type settings.
      • Dynamic: Set index, source, and source type based on the content or metadata of the incoming messages.
      • Advanced: Allows you to specify a custom URL endpoint.

    4. Configure the endpoint of the destination.

      • Advanced: Enter your Splunk URL into the URL field, for example, https://<your-splunk-tenant-id>.splunkcloud.com:8088 for Splunk Cloud Platform free trials, or https://<your-splunk-tenant-id>.splunkcloud.com for Splunk Cloud Platform instances.
      • Simple and Dynamic:
        1. Select the HTTPS or HTTP protocol to use to access your destination.
        2. Enter the Hostname and Port of the destination.

    5. Specify the Splunk index to send the data to.

      • Simple: Enter the expression that specifies the Splunk index to use into the Index field, for example: netops. All data will be sent into this index.
      • Dynamic and Advanced:
        1. Enter the name of the Default Index. The data will be sent into this index if no other index is set during the processing of the message (based on automatic classification, or by the processing steps of the Flow). Make sure that the index exists in Splunk.
        2. Enter the Default Source and Default Source Type. These will be assigned to the messages that have no source or source type set during the processing of the message (based on automatic classification, or by the processing steps of the Flow).

    6. Enter the token you’ve created into the Token field.

    7. Disable the Verify server certificate option unless your deployment has a valid, non-self-signed certificate. Free Splunk Cloud accounts have self-signed certificates.

    8. (Optional) Set other options as needed for your environments.

      • Timeout: The number of seconds to wait for a log-forwarding request to complete, and attempt to reconnect the server if exceeded. If the timeout is exceeded, AxoRouter attempts to reconnect the destination. The default (0) is unlimited. For more details, see the AxoSyslog documentation.
      • Batch Bytes: Sets the maximum size of payload in a batch. If the size of the messages reaches this value, AxoRouter sends the batch to the destination even if the number of messages is less than the value of the batch lines option.
      • Batch Lines: Number of lines sent to the destination in one batch. AxoRouter waits for this number of lines to accumulate and sends them off in a single batch. Increasing this number increases throughput as more messages are sent in a single batch, but also increases message latency. For more details, see the AxoSyslog documentation.
      • Batch Timeout: Maximal time in milliseconds to wait for a batch to be filled before sending it. The default value (-1) means that the batch should be full before sending, which may result in a long wait if the incoming traffic is low. For more details, see the AxoSyslog documentation.
      • Number of Workers: Used for scaling the destination in case of high message load. Specifies the number of worker threads AxoRouter uses for sending messages to the destination. The default is 1. If high message throughput is not a concern, leave it on 1. For maximum performance, increase it up to the number of CPU cores available on AxoRouter. For more details, see the AxoSyslog documentation.

    9. Select Add.

  3. Create a flow to connect the new destination to an AxoRouter instance.

    1. Select Flows.

    2. Select Add Flow.

    3. Enter a name for the flow, for example, my-test-flow.

      Create a flow

    4. In the Router Selector field, enter an expression that matches the router(s) you want to apply the flow. To select a specific router, use a name selector, for example, name = my-axorouter-hostname.

      You can use any labels and metadata of the AxoRouter hosts in the Router selectors, for example, the hostname of the AxoRouter, or any custom labels.

      • If you leave the Router Selector field empty, the selector will match every AxoRouter instance.
      • To select only a specific AxoRouter instance, set the name field to the name of the instance as selector. For example, name = my-axorouter.
      • If you set multiple fields in the selector, the selector will match only AxoRouter instances that match all elements of the selector. (There in an AND relationship between the fields.)

    5. Select the Destination where you want to send your data. If you don’t have any destination configured, you can select + Add in the destination section to create a new destination now. For details on the different destinations, see Destinations.

      • If you don’t have any destination configured, see Destinations.
      • If you’ve already created a store, it automatically available as a destination. Note that the Router Selector of the flow must match only AxoRouters that have the selected store available, otherwise you’ll get an error message.
      • If you want to send data to another AxoRouter, enable the Show all destinations option, and select the connector of the AxoRouter where you want to send the data.

      AxoRouter as destination

    6. (Optional) To process the data transferred in the flow, select Add New Processing Step. For details, see Processing steps. For example:

      1. Add a Classify, a Parse, and a Reduce step, in that order, to automatically remove redundant and empty fields from your data.
      2. To select which messages are processed by the flow, add a Select Messages step, and enter a filter into the AQL Expression field. For example, to select only the messages received from Fortinet FortiGate firewalls, use the meta.vendor = fortinet AND meta.product = fortigate query.
      3. Save the processing steps.

      Example processing steps

    7. Select Add.

    8. The new flow appears in the Flows list.

      The new flow

You can use the following message fields to modify messages sent to this destination using processing steps.