Deployment (Part 3)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 






To read part 1, please click here
To read part 2, please click here





Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA)

MMA is used across multiple Microsoft solutions and has undergone a few name changes as its features and functionality have evolved. If it is being considered to be used, then following areas should be covered during a Microsoft Sentinel deployment project:
  • Consider the timelines and the strategy for a migration to AMA (Azure Monitor Agent) before the MMA end-of-life. 
  • Consider the central deployment and management methodology for MMA.
  • Determine which endpoints are in scope for deployment as these affect the log ingestion volume significantly. 

Azure Monitor Agent (AMA)

Organizations with MMA as the main Microsoft Sentinel agent should start planning the migration to AMA as soon as possible to avoid a rushed migration. One of the main advantages of AMA is the ability to control the log collection policy centrally and apply different policies against different groups of computers, regardless if they are Azure VMs, on-premises servers or VMs in third-party cloud platforms like AWS and GCP. 

AMA is supported on both Windows and Linux OS (MMA was used only on Windows, with the OMS agent acting as its counterpart on Linux). AMA allows increased granularity of the types of log collected and multi-homing-AMA offers the ability to implement multiple log collection options for each of them. These two options combined enables the ability to split the stream of log data, with the critical sent to Microsoft Sentinel for real-time monitoring, while less important log can be sent to a more cost effective storage option.

Deploying the AMA on Linux allows for the collection of any syslog message or local logs that follow a consistent naming convention. Any Linux agent with AMA installed can act as a syslog collector for remote syslog log sources.

Deploying Syslog Collector

For remote syslog log collection, Microsoft Sentinel requires a syslog server with Linux rsyslog or syslog-ng syslog servers with rsyslog as the most common choice. The server can be deployed on-premises, as a VM or physical server - or as a VM in Azure or other cloud environments. Its main requirement is to provide routing and connectivity from the log sources that need to send syslog data. 

The hardware requirements for the syslog collector depend on the expected logging volume. Generally, syslog collector will simply receive the logs and forward them to Microsoft Sentinel. It is used to receive both plain syslog logs and CEF, but, the same facility should not be used by both CEF and non-CEF log sources. 

Conclusion

This part discuss about MMA, AMA, and syslog collector. 







To read part 1, please click here
To read part 2, please click here
















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Query, Visualize, & Monitor Data in Azure Sentinel

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Azure Sentinel Workbooks Several ready for use templates are provided by the Azure Sentinel that can be used to create your own workbook and then modify them as needed for Contoso. Most of the data connectors it uses to ingest data come with their own workbooks, but better insight can be obtained by simply looking into the data that is being ingested by using tables and visualizations, including bar and pie charts. You can also make your own workbook easily by using this data from the beginning instead of using the predefined templates. Workbook Page You can easily access the workbook page from the Azure Sentinel from the navigation pane which consists of the: Workbook header- You can add a new workbook and review the saved workbooks as well as templates that are available on the workbook page. Templates section- You can access existing workbook templates on the Templates tab. You can save some of the workbooks for quick access and they will appear on the My Workbooks tab.  From the
Read more

Planning for Implementing SAP Solutions on Azure (Part 2 of 5)

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  To read part 1 please click  here To read part 3 please click  here To read part 4 please click  here To read part 5 please click  here Load Balancing The load balancer uses probe ports to determine as well as route the traffic to an active DBMS node, but of there's any failover then the most common SAP application architecture can automatically reconnect against the private virtual IP address without the need for the SAP application to reconfigure it, while the load balancer redirect the traffic against the private virtual IP address without any need for the SAP application to reconfigure. The loaf balancer also offers an option of DirectServerReturn which if configured, can help in directing the traffic from the DBMS VM to the SAP application layer directly to the application layer without routing through the load balancer. But, if it isn't configured, then the return traffic to the SAP application layer is routed through the load balancer. You can also use Azure Load Balan
Read more

Work with String Data Using KQL Statements

By Ashwin Venugopal -
Image
  Extract Data from Unstructured String Fields Unstructured string fields often contains the Security log data and requires parsing to extract data. There are multiple ways of pulling information from string fields in KQL and the two primary operators used are extract and parse.  Extract It gets a match for a regular expression from a text string. You can convert the extracted substring to the indicated type.  Arguments regex- A regular expression. captureGroup- A positive int constant indicating the capture group to extract. 0 stands for the entire match, 1 for the value matched by the first '('parenthesis')' in the regular expression, 2 or more for subsequent parenthesis.  text- A string to search. typeLiteral- An optional type literal. If provided, the extracted substring is converted to this type.  Returns If regex finds a match in text- the substring matched against the indicated capture group captureGroup, optionally converted to typeLiteral. If there's no mat
Read more