News and Blog

29 Jan

The disappearing Windows DNS debug log

TL;DR

The Windows DNS service may not recreate the debug log file after rollover. If you get hit by the issue, make sure to use the C: drive for the debug log path.

The Windows DNS debug log

The Windows DNS debug log contains information on DNS queries and activity that can be important to monitor and analyze to detect malicious traffic. This requires some configuration changes for the DNS service in order to enable debug logging.  Here is a short description on how to enable debug logging for the DNS service on windows, this also applies to Windows 2008 and later. It is possible to specify the file and path name of the DNS debug log file as well as the maximum size of the file. 

By DNS, Windows, debug logRead more...
07 Sep

Agentless vs. Agent based log collection

The NXLog Enterprise Edition offers both agentless and agent based log collection so it's possible to use it in both ways or even in mixed mode.

In most enterprise environments the common data sources are mainly Syslog, local log files (IIS, DNS, custom app logs) and Windows Eventlog. Let's take a look at how this event data can be collected with the agentless or the agent based method.

By 0 Comments Read more...
21 Jul

Structured logging - why should you do that?

Structured logging is on the rise. A lot of tools and logging services are finally moving towards structured logging and JSON seems to be the format of choice for this.

But what is structured logging? Traditionally logs were generated in the form of free form text messages prepended with some basic metadata such as the time of the event, severity and the source of the event. This is what the old RFC3164 style Syslog format looks like:


<30>Nov 21 11:40:27 myhost sshd[26459]: Accepted publickey for myhost from 192.168.1.1 port 424242 ssh2

This traditional syslog fromat has a header consisting of the severity, facility, timestamp, hostname and process name followed by a free form text string optionally containing additional metadata. The advantage of this is that log data in this format can be easily parsed and stored in text files for humans to look at.

By structured logging, JSON, security onion, sysmonRead more...
23 Apr

Using NXLog with Elasticsearch and Kibana

The popularity of the ELK stack is steadily rising, many NXLog users send their event data to Elasticsearch and Kibana for log monitoring and analytics.

There are many tutorials and configurations scattered around on the web, some come with configuration samples that will likely not work properly.  For this reason we have written a short document introducing different options on how to use NXLog with Elasticsearch and Kibana, it's available under the documentation page.

By Elasticsearch, Kibana, ELK, log monitoringRead more...

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