-----Original Message----- From: Martin Kosek [mailto:mko...@redhat.com] Sent: 29 April 2015 07:42 To: Innes, Duncan; freeipa-devel@redhat.com Subject: Re: [Freeipa-devel] Suggestion for the A part of IPA
> On 04/28/2015 05:58 PM, Innes, Duncan wrote: > > Folks, > > > > The A part of IPA has always been of great interest to me. Our > > current IPA infrastructure works well at the I & P parts, giving us > > great failover abilities and connectivity through hardware firewalls > > without punching too many holes. > > Good to hear :-) We recently also started investigating the Audit > capabilities for (notice I write "for" and not "in") IPA. You can check > my initial nudge to the freeipa-users list, which was unfortunately > with no reply: > > https://www.redhat.com/archives/freeipa-users/2015-March/msg00940.html > > For the beginning, I would be interested for your use cases, if you are > only looking for a centralized log store, or you are also looking for > more analytics in the logs (like what API commands were run, user > logins, etc.) or utilization of the server core services > (LDAP/Kerberos/DNS/...) I'm actually interested in both pieces. It started off as generic centralised logging, but when I moved from plain rsyslog data to sending JSON formatted data I started getting richer and richer data. I got the IPA servers sending their dirsrv access and error logs back by using rsyslog's imfile module. http://www.freeipa.org/page/Howto/Centralised_Logging_with_Logstash/Elas ticSearch/Kibana This isn't too good, however, as imfile polls on an interval with my version of rsyslog7 and IPA logs are written only with HH:MM:SS level accuracy. (I'm sure there was a ticket to increase timestamp resolution, but I can't find it right now) But now I've got a load of the IPA logs back centrally, I'm beyond my own abilities in parsing much good stuff out of it. I haven't even parsed it out into any key:value pairs yet - which would be a big boost to ELK Searching on it. > > Whilst the A part may not be solely about centralised logging, it's > > the thing I've been looking into recently. To do this I've built a > > setup around the ELK stack using a pair of Logstash servers and an > > ElasticSearch cluster of 5 servers (overkill on the ES side perhaps, > > but this is proof of concept still). To expand on this, I've been > > looking at running the Logstash serviceon each of our IPA servers as > > that gives us a failover pair in each part of our network. The > > Logstash servers then connect to the ES cluster as non-data nodes. > > Each client has an > > rsyslog7 (still using RHEL6 at the moment) config that writes sends > > the logs in JSON format with some extra bespoke fields added (such as > > Project, Environment, and Use to help us search better). The sending > > is done in rsyslog's rather clunky failover method to the local pair > > of Logstash servers (with a third failover being to /dev/null). > > Ah, so you are running Logstash service on each IPA service? Isn't that > too heavyweight? In our tests, we mostly simply wanted just configure > rsyslog and get the logs out of the server, to the centralized > ELK/REK/EFK servers which did the heavy lifting. After all, the IPA > servers may be of different environments (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, ...) > and with different versions of the log processing software. The Logstash servers really don't produce much load on our systems. I expected them to, but it didn't materialise. The load may be a lighter due to me using rsyslog templates to send the logs pre-formatted as JSON? > On the REK server (yes, we did not use logstash at the POC), we are able > to process the logs (make them structured), store and display them. This > allows us do searches like "list of admins which added users in the last > month". > > This if course required adding parsing rules to rsyslog to get the > structure out of the API logs. Are you using logstash for the parsing or > did you not start the parsing part yet? No parsing of the dirsrv logs yet. I've been concentrating on pushing the Whole centralised logging issue from PoC to Production so far. The IPA logs were a side-issue for us, but it's definitely something that would help if could get them properly structured. > > It struck me that this kind of setup might not be too far removed from > > some of the A part of IPA. > > The centralized log processing itself is a too big task for IPA itself, > it is specialized on other things. But some integration should be added > in time, I agree. It may be minimal, from top of my head for example: > > * Support of (rsyslog) configuration in ipa-client-install or > ipa-server-install > * Providing the secure, GSSAPI-based log transfer to the IPA clients and > ELK/REK/EFK server > * Providing parsing templates for rsyslog or base queries for Kibana That sounds the right way to start for sure. I've also been tracking journalctl's ability to send logs to an ELK setup. This is already looking to be a much simpler setup once a few issues are cleared up. > > I'm not good at ASCII flowchart diagrams, so will leave it there for > > now. The main point of this - does any of this idea sound reasonable > > to add in to FreeIPA? To me it sounds like a good fit for getting > > (some) logging data back to a central point. > > > > The Logstash indexers currently have a very low load (perhaps due to > > the incoming data already being JSON) and small memory footprint. > > They run without issue on our IPA servers. The ES nodes are different > > and I won't pretent to be any sort of expert in what they do. They > > load up a bit when I shut 1 of them down, but that's the rebalancing happening. > > > > Apologies if this is off topic, or wide of the mark. > > > > Cheers > > > > Duncan Innes > > This message has been checked for viruses and spam by the Virgin Money email scanning system powered by Messagelabs. 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