The blog post written by Rapid7 is a step-by-step walkthrough of using NXLog to transform an ingress authentication log into UEF.
Can you make this happen for free? No doubt. As one Reddit member says - "Our org for $0 yearly does the following. Dump every log using NXLog to Graylog."
With nxlog as log forwarder to graylog. You can specify in nxlog config which events you want to be forwarder.
Why not nxlog for the log server as well? It’s beautiful. Highly recommended - easy XML config, decent documentation, good info and example config around. I’ve used external scripts, kvp parsing, json formatting, GELF to graylog, all works great.
This video shows a quick and easy way to send Windows Event Logs to a syslog server by installing the NXlog client on a Windows 2012 R2 Server.
Assuming your environments have been configured to log this stuff...nxlog will automatically forward all of these windows events to your SIEM for you in real time...you don't need a script to make this happen.
In his article titled Security Information & Event Management Design: Why log filtering is essential for windows domain log sources? Paul Dutot from Defence Logic raises some valid points about agent side filtering which we have been advocating for some time now. Well worth the read!
It's always delighting to hear users recommend NXLog:
NxLog - Such an awesome little free tool that will push windows events to your log aggregator in a variety of formats. Can even read in from files and push contents out
There was a discussion by the community on reddit about Centralized logging with Windows Event Forwarding. Some alternatives were also recommended.
Unfetter Analytic is a reference implementation supported by The MITRE Corporation and the National Security Agency (NSA). This reference implementation uses NXLog to collect Windows events.
A new book was published recently titled Industrial Cybersecurity. This book is a one-step guide to understanding industrial cyber security, its control systems, and its operations. The book recommends NXLog to collect logs from a Windows system in chapter ICS Network Security.
Eric Conrad gave a talk at at DerbyCon7 and mentioned NXLog being a cool solution that can collect Windows Eventlog remotely on Linux via Windows Event Forwarding. Check out the video on Youtube.
