I have been looking at options to ship logs from Windows, I have already got logstash set up, and I currently ship logs from Linux (CentOS) servers to my ELK stack using the logstash-forwarder and ssl encryption.
For compliance reasons encryption is pretty much essential in this environment.
I was hoping to use logstash-forwarder in Windows as well, but after compiling with Go I ran in to issues shipping Event Logs, and I found some people saying that it wasn't possible because of file locking issues, which the logstash-forwarder people appear to be working on, but I can't really wait.
Anyway, eventually I found out that nxlog seems to be able to ship logs in an encrypted format using ssl, I've found a few posts about similar topics and while I've learned quite a bit about how to ship the logs across and how to set up nxlog, I am still at a loss with how to set up logstash to accept the logs so I can process them.
I've asked in the #nxlog and #logstash irc channels, and got some confirmation in #nxlog that it is possible, no further information on how it should be configured.
Anyway, I have taken the crt file created for use with my logstash-forwarder (I will create a new one if needed when I am happy that this will work) and renamed it with a pem extension, which I believe should work as it is readable in ASCII format. I have created the environment variable for %CERTDIR% and put my file in there, I have written the following config file for nxlog from the other articles I have read, I think it is right, but I am not 100% sure:
## This is a sample configuration file. See the nxlog reference manual about the
## configuration options. It should be installed locally and is also available
## online at http://nxlog.org/nxlog-docs/en/nxlog-reference-manual.html
## Please set the ROOT to the folder your nxlog was installed into,
## otherwise it will not start.
#define ROOT C:\Program Files\nxlog
define ROOT C:\Program Files (x86)\nxlog
Moduledir %ROOT%\modules
CacheDir %ROOT%\data
Pidfile %ROOT%\data\nxlog.pid
SpoolDir %ROOT%\data
LogFile %ROOT%\data\nxlog.log
# Enable json extension
<Extension json>
Module xm_json
</Extension>
# Nxlog internal logs
<Input internal>
Module im_internal
Exec $EventReceivedTime = integer($EventReceivedTime) / 1000000; to_json();
</Input>
# Windows Event Log
<Input eventlog>
# Uncomment im_msvistalog for Windows Vista/2008 and later
Module im_msvistalog
# Uncomment im_mseventlog for Windows XP/2000/2003
# Module im_mseventlog
Exec $EventReceivedTime = integer($EventReceivedTime) / 1000000; to_json();
</Input>
<Output sslout>
Module om_ssl
Host lumberjack.domain.com
Port 5000
CertFile %CERTDIR%/logstash-forwarder.crt
AllowUntrusted TRUE
OutputType Binary
</Output>
<Route 1>
Path eventlog, internal => sslout
</Route>
What I want to know is what input format to use in logstash I have tried shipping logs in to a lumberjack input type (using the same config as my logstash-forwarders use) with the following config:
input {
lumberjack {
port => 5000
type => "logs"
ssl_certificate => "/etc/pki/tls/certs/logstash-forwarder.crt"
ssl_key => "/etc/pki/tls/private/logstash-forwarder.key"
}
}
But when the service started I get the following in the nxlog logfiles:
2014-11-06 21:16:20 INFO connecting to lumberjack.domain.com:5000
2014-11-06 21:16:20 INFO nxlog-ce-2.8.1248 started
2014-11-06 21:16:21 INFO successfully connected to lumberjack.domain.com:5000
2014-11-06 21:16:22 INFO remote closed SSL socket
2014-11-06 21:16:22 INFO reconnecting in 1 seconds
2014-11-06 21:16:23 INFO connecting to lumberjack.domain.com:5000
2014-11-06 21:16:24 INFO reconnecting in 2 seconds
2014-11-06 21:16:24 ERROR couldn't connect to ssl socket on lumberjack.antmarketing.com:5000; No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.
When I turned the logging up to DEBUG I see a massive amount of logs flying through, but I think the key part is:
2014-11-06 21:20:18 ERROR Exception was caused by "rv" at om_ssl.c:532/io_err_handler(); [om_ssl.c:532/io_err_handler()] -; [om_ssl.c:501/om_ssl_connect()] couldn't connect to ssl socket on lumberjack.domain.com:5000; No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.
I assume this points to me using the wrong input method on logstash, but I guess it could also be an issue with my ssl certs or the way it is configured. I don't appear to be getting any logs on the logstash server being generated at the time I make the connection from my Windows machine.