Sentinel POC- Architecture and Recommendations For MSSPs (Part 5)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 






To read part 1, please click here
To read part 2, please click here
To read part 3, please click here
To read part 4, please click here
To read part 6, please click here





Storage Options

The default storage option for Sentinel ingestion is Analytics table whose retention time can be adjusted for all tables within the workspace or individually per table. A different cost efficient plan can also be used which is called Basic which has interactive retention of 8 days. However, it does have some restrictions, like- not able to trigger alerts and limited KQL commands. This tables are meant to be used with noisy logs, such as firewall logs or flow logs, and are normally used for debugging or troubleshooting purposes. 

A total retention can be set for both Analytic and Basic tables by configuring a total retention period, after which the data will be moved to Archive completing the retention period. The total retention is maximum 7 years. Search feature can be useful to query and rehydrate data from Archive as and when needed.

All these options above are readily available in Log Analytics Workspace, but some of the external storage options are- Blob Storage and Azure Data Explorer (ADX). Blob storage can be queried via externaldata operator in KQL, which can also be used within an analytic rule. Besides, ADX and Blob Storage can be combined and an external table can be created in ADX pointing the whole container.

Following is the summary of various storage options available currently:



Update: Workspace Manager

It is new feature introduced recently. It allows MSSPs to configure the MSSP workspace to act as the parent or grandparent of various other workspaces, typically customer workspaces. However, Workspace Manager still depends on Azure Lighthouse, which is essential to be able to configure workspaces managed from a central MSSP workspace. Workspace Manager can help an MSSP in publishing content to the child workspaces. 

This feature allows MSSPs to group customer workspaces depending on their requirements. For example, healthcare customers may have different analytic rule and workbook requirements than education customers; hence, MSSPs can group them and publish different content to each of those workspaces. Since workspaces can be a [art of different groups, contents from different groups to the same workspace can be published. An ideal MSSP solution should include a combination of both Repositories and Workspace Manager.










To read part 1, please click here
To read part 2, please click here
To read part 3, please click here
To read part 4, please click here
To read part 6, please click here













































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