Aruba ClearPass

Ingest Aruba ClearPass data into LogScale to identify anomalous network patterns through correlation with firewall data.

This package provides a parser for Aruba ClearPass logs in structured syslog format (RFC 5424).

Breaking Changes

This update includes parser changes, which means that data ingested after upgrade will not be backwards compatible with logs ingested with the previous version.

Updating to version 1.0.0 or newer will therefore result in issues with existing queries in for example dashboards or alerts created prior to this version.

See CrowdStrike Parsing Standard (CPS) for more details on the new parser schema.

Follow the CPS Migration to update your queries to use the fields and tags that are available in data parsed with version 1.0.0.

Configurations and Sending The Logs to LogScale

See Aruba Syslog Specification Manual for information on how to send ClearPass logs to Falcon LogScale Collector.

Installing the Aruba ClearPass Package in LogScale

Find the repository where you want to send the ClearPass logs, or create a new one.

  1. Navigate to your repository in the LogScale interface, click Settings and then Packages on the left.

  2. Click Marketplace and install the LogScale package for ClearPass (i.e. aruba/clearpass).

  3. When the package has finished installing, click Ingest tokens on the left (still under the Settings, see Ingest Tokens).

  4. In the right panel, click + Add Token to create a new token. Give the token an appropriate name (e.g.the name of the server and the name of the server the token is ingesting logs for), and and assign to the parser clearpass-syslog using the LogScale Collector Configuration as described in the documentation Sources & Examples.

    Before leaving this page, view the ingest token and copy it to your clipboard — to save it temporarily elsewhere.

    Now that you have a repository set up in LogScale along with an ingest token you're ready to send logs to LogScale.

  5. Next, configure the Falcon LogScale Collector to ship the logs from your syslog server into LogScale. Follow LogScale Collector Installing the LogScale Collector and Configuring LogScale Collector. LogScale Collector documentation also provides an example of how you can configure your syslog datasource, see Sources & Examples.

Setting Up ClearPass to Send Logs

After the package is installed in the relevant repository and you've created an ingest token:

  1. Assign the ingest token to the clearpass-syslog parser.

  2. Next, set up a syslog target and add syslog export filters in the ClearPass console to send logs to the LogScale Collector, which acts as the syslog receiver.

  3. The hostname field should be set to the LogScale IP address, select TCP for the protocol field, and confirm the server port number is correct, depending on whether it's different from the default.

  4. Finally, to send the logs to LogScale, enroll the LogScale collector with the syslog configuration. You must specify the ingest token assigned to this parser (clearpass-syslog).

Note

When adding syslog export filters, the export event format must be set to RFC 5424.

Verify Data is Arriving in LogScale

Once you have completed the above steps the ClearPass data should be arriving in your LogScale repository.

You can verify this by doing a simple search for #Vendor = "aruba" | Product = "clearpass" to see the events.

Package Contents Explained

This package parses incoming data, and normalizing the data as part of that parsing. The parser normalizes the data to CrowdStrike Parsing Standard (CPS) schema based on OpenTelemetry standards, while still preserving the original data.

If you want to search using the original field names and values, you can access those in the fields whose names are prefixed with the word "Vendor". Fields which are not prefixed with "Vendor" are standard fields which are either based on the schema (e.g. source.ip) or on LogScale conventions (e.g. @rawstring).

The fields which the parser currently maps the data to, are chosen based on what seems the most relevant, and will potentially be expanded in the future. But the parser won't necessarily normalize every field that has potential to be normalized.

Event Categorisation

As part of the schema, events are categorized by different fields, including:

  • event.kind

  • event.type

  • event.category

event.category is an array, so needs to be searched like so: 

array:contains("event.category[]", value="network")

This will find events where some event.category[n] field contains the value "info", regardless of what `n` is. Note that not all events will be categorized to this level of detail.

Normalized Fields

Here are some of the normalized fields which are being set by this parser:

  • event.* (e.g. event.type, event.kind, event.category, event.id, event.module)

  • user.* (e.g. user.name)

  • log.* (e.g. log.syslog.appname, log.syslog.priority, log.syslog.msgid, log.syslog.version,log.syslog.hostname,log.structured)

  • ecs* (e.g. ecs.version )