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Importing Logs from Winlogbeat into Falcon LogScale

October 31, 2022

Tech Center

Getting Started

Although CrowdStrike Falcon® LogScale, previously known as Humio, is a leading observability technology for handling containerized and cloud-based logs and events, Falcon LogScale also makes it easy to ingest Windows event logs. We do this by leveraging Winlogbeat by Elastic.

Winlogbeat is a native Windows event-log shipping agent usually installed as a Windows service. We can use Winlogbeat to collect and transmit event logs to multiple destinations, including LogScale.

This how-to guide will walk you through setting up Winlogbeat (open-source version) on a Windows host and configuring it to publish logs and events to a LogScale repository. We’ll verify our setup by demonstrating some example queries, showing the immediate value of our implementation.

Set Up LogScale

To use LogScale, you will need a LogScale account. You can sign up for the Falcon LogScale Community Edition. After logging in, we can view all of our LogScale repositories.

Repositories WinLogBeat_1

Create a new LogScale repository

We start by creating a repository. We click + Add new.

Repositories and views WinLogBeat_2

We select Repository to add a repository.

Repositories WinLogBeat_3

Note: LogScale Community Edition allows for only one repository. If you already have an existing repository, you’ll need to remove it before you can add a new one, or use the previously created repository for this data.

We need the ingest token for this new repository, which Winlogbeat will use for authentication when sending log data to LogScale. We navigate to the Ingest Tokens page of our new repository settings, and we click Add Token.

Ingest Tokens WinLogBeat_4

After entering a name and ingest format to associate with the token, we can view it to copy its value.

Token WinLogBeat_5

We’ll use this token value as the password for Winlogbeat shortly.

Set Up Winlogbeat

The version of Winlogbeat that works with LogScale is the open-source edition (Winlogbeat OSS). Elastic also provides a standard edition, but that version is designed only to work with their own products.

Install Winlogbeat

We go to the downloads page for Winlogbeat OSS and choose the latest download. Because of some known issues with 8.0 and above, we’ll opt for the latest 7.x version. We can use the new beta MSI package for an easier install.

WinLogBeat_6

Edit configuration settings

After accepting the license and completing the installation, we navigate to the data directory for Winlogbeat.

WinLogBeat folders_7

We’ll need to edit winlogbeat.yml. However, you might need to modify the file permissions to be allowed to read and edit the file. Right-click the file and choose properties. Then, navigate to the Security tab. If you don’t have read/edit permissions, you’ll need to use the Advanced options dialog to make yourself the owner of the file.

WinLogBeat settings_8

After doing this, you’ll be prompted to re-open the file.

WinLogBeat win_security_9

Ensure we are capturing the correct logs

With file permissions set correctly, we can open the file in an editor like Visual Studio Code.

WinLogBeat.yml_10

We verify that we are pulling in the application, system, and security events.

Add configuration settings for LogScale

Next, we scroll down to the commented-out section for Elasticsearch.

WinLogBeat elasticsearch_11

We will want to use our LogScale Elastic ingestion endpoint. For LogScale Community Edition, the hosts value is:

hosts: ["https://cloud.community.humio.com/api/v1/ingest/elastic-bulk"]

For other types of LogScale accounts, you can reference all of LogScale’s available endpoint URLs here.

The password will be your LogScale repository ingest token which you copied from above.

password: "****************************************************"

Lastly, ensure we are using the HTTPS endpoint:

protocol: "https"

Start the Winlogbeat service

Lastly, we need to start the Winlogbeat service with these new settings. We open up Services by going to the Task Manager, choosing File/Run New Task, and entering services.msc.

WinLogBeatTask_manager_12

In the list of services, we see the Winlogbeat service.

WinLogBeat_services_13

Right-click the service and choose Start.

Validating our configuration

If you have trouble starting Winlogbeat, your problem might be in the configuration YAML file. You can test the file using the winlogbeat command-line application.

For example, let’s say we had accidentally configured two different outputs. We run the following test:

C:\ProgramData\Elastic\Beats\winlogbeat>"C:\Program Files\Elastic\Beats\7.17.5\winlogbeat.cmd" test config winlogbeat.yml
Exiting: error unpacking config data: more than one namespace configured accessing 'output' (source:'C:\ProgramData\Elastic\Beats\winlogbeat\winlogbeat.yml')

The results of the configuration test should help you determine what’s going on with your setup.

If your installation was successful and your YAML configuration file is valid, then the test should give the following result:

C:\ProgramData\Elastic\Beats\winlogbeat>"C:\Program Files\Elastic\Beats\7.17.5\winlogbeat.cmd" test config winlogbeat.yml

Config OK

Once started, you should see the Service is running.

WinLogBeat_services_14

Verifying Results at LogScale

With everything running and connected, we can verify our results with some sample queries.

Example query 1: Show Windows Security SPP entries

Back in our LogScale repository, we can start to comb through the results coming in. For instance, we can filter down our results to just show Windows Security SPP entries. We use the following query: event.provider = “Microsoft-Windows-Security-SPP”.

WinLogBeat_event.provider_15

Looking at each result in the list, we can see some of the many fields LogScale collects on our behalf.

WinLogBeat_event.provider_16

Example query 2: Show specific activities on a specific host

As another example, let’s assume that we want to find User Event Management activities on a specific host. We could do that with the query agent.name = (Hostname) and event.action = “User Account Management”.

WinLogBeat_agent.name_17

Collecting Windows Setup Events and More

In our initial Winlogbeat configuration, we set up the service to collect application, system, and security events. What if we also wanted to collect and ship Windows setup events?

We can open the Event Viewer in Windows to see the name of the log we wish to capture.

WinLogBeat_EventViewer_19

We see that the log is called “Setup.” So, we’ll update our winlogbeat.yml file to add a line for that log.

WinLogBeat_Setup_20

In the list of services, we right-click on the Winlogbeat service and choose restart to have the changes take effect.

WinLogBeat_Services_21

To verify that this is working, we start by looking at our Windows Event Viewer for a recent setup event.

WinLogBeat_Services_22

Then, we go to LogScale and use the following query: agent.name = (HOST NAME) | winlog.channel = Setup.

WinLogBeat_22

 We see the same log event in our query results. It works!

Adding more logs

Windows has an extensive list of logs that we can add to Winlogbeat and ship to LogScale. We can see the full list by using the following command in a Powershell prompt as an administrator:

Get-WinEvent -ListLog * | Format-Table -Property LogName

 

WinLogBeat_listlog_23

Summary

In this how-to guide, we showed how easy it is to add Windows monitoring to LogScale by using the freely available Winlogbeat log shipper on your Windows hosts. We walked through these simple steps:

  • Setting up an account and a repository with LogScale Community Edition
  • Installing and configuring Winlogbeat (OSS version)
  • Using LogScale queries to verify that Windows logs are being shipped correctly
  • Adding other Windows logs beside the Winlogbeat defaults (application, system, and security events).

Happy logging!

 

Additional Resources

 

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