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English Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: binaryanomaly on April 29, 2020, 07:36:55 PM

Title: Recommendation for analysing the Firewall Logs
Post by: binaryanomaly on April 29, 2020, 07:36:55 PM
Hi,

My setup is quite fresh and I'm in progress of configuring the firewall rules etc. Therefore it's quite important to often consult the log to check what is being blocked that shouldn't etc.

What is the best/recommended way to analyze the firewall log to i.e. see what connection attempts have been blocked, how many, etc.

I find the live view quite good but it's only a live view and data is refreshed quite fast, means entries are often gone before I had a chance to inspect them. On the other I'd just want to have a summary of blocked connections etc. that I can verify at the end of the day or so. The plain log is a bit difficult to process visually.

How do you guys handle this? What additional tools, etc. do you use?

Thanks


PS: Mostly interested in simple, low effort solutions. I'm not sure I want to take the extra effort to maintain an ELK installation.
Title: Re: Recommendation for analysing the Firewall Logs
Post by: spetrillo on April 30, 2020, 08:33:14 PM
I went down the ELK rabbit hole...and yes it is quite deep!
Title: Re: Recommendation for analysing the Firewall Logs
Post by: deputycag on April 30, 2020, 09:08:44 PM
I have been using papertrail.  Seems easy and I can get away with free version.  Also allows me to get email alerts when IPS blocks something.
Title: Re: Recommendation for analysing the Firewall Logs
Post by: binaryanomaly on May 01, 2020, 04:14:58 PM
Thanks both for your answers.

Seems like there's only the choice between the very limited internal facilities or going down the ELK or other external solution rabbit hole, where I am still not sure I want to go.
Title: Re: Recommendation for analysing the Firewall Logs
Post by: lfirewall1243 on May 05, 2020, 03:23:43 PM
Graylog is very good as well
Title: Re: Recommendation for analysing the Firewall Logs
Post by: banana999 on May 06, 2020, 01:56:15 PM
Check out PF ELK https://github.com/3ilson/pfelk
Title: Re: Recommendation for analysing the Firewall Logs
Post by: binaryanomaly on May 10, 2020, 12:51:10 PM
Thanks all for the replies.

I have for now decided to give sensei a chance and rely more on it for the management of Application Level client traffic. It also comes with more advanced logging and monitoring capabilities built-in.

https://wiki.opnsense.org/vendor/sunnyvalley/sensei.html

That said it is not open source and the more advanced features are paid which I'm ok with.