Data Analytics: Watching and Alerting on real-time changing data in Elasticsearch using Kibana and SentiNL
In the previous post, we have setup ELK stack and ran data analytics on application events and logs. In this post, we will discuss how you can watch real-time application events that are being persisted in the Elasticsearch index and raise alerts if condition for watcher is breached using SentiNL (Kibana plugin).
Few examples of alerting for application events (see previous posts) are:
- Same user logged in from different IP addresses.
- Different users logged in from same IP address.
- PermissionFailures in last 15 minutes.
- Particular kind of exception in last 15 minutes/ hour/ day.
Watching and alerting on Elasticsearch index in Kibana
There are many plugins available for watching and alerting on Elasticsearch index in Kibana e.g. X-Pack, SentiNL.
X-Pack is a paid extension provided by elastic.co which provides security, alerting, monitoring, reporting and graph capabilities.
SentiNL is free extension provided by siren.io which provides alerting and reporting functionality to monitor, notify and report changes in elasticsearch index using standard queries, programmable validators and configurable actions.
We will be using SentiNL for watching and alerting on Elasticsearch index.
Installing SentiNL
Prerequisite
For debian, we need libfontconfig and libfreetype6 libraries, if not installed already.
sudo apt-get install libfontconfig libfreetype6
For centos, we need fontconfig and freetype libraries, if not installed already.
sudo yum install fontconfig freetype
// Installing SentiNL plugin /opt/kibana/bin/kibana-plugin --install sentinl -u https://github.com/sirensolutions/sentinl/releases/download/tag-4.6.4-4/sentinl.zip
Configuring SentiNL
SentiNL have wide range of actions that you can configure for watchers. You can send an email, integrate with Slack channel or pushapps, send payload to custom webhook. Open kibana.yml file and add below properties for SentiNL. For our example, we will only enable notification through email.
sentinl:
es:
host: 'localhost'
port: 9200
settings:
email:
active: true
host: "smtp.gmail.com"
user: "[EMAIL_ID]"
password: "[PASSWORD]"
port: 465
domain: "gmail.com"
ssl: true
tls: false
authentication: ['PLAIN', 'LOGIN', 'CRAM-MD5', 'XOAUTH2']
timeout: 20000 # mail server connection timeout
# cert:
# key: '/full/sys/path/to/key/file'
# cert: '/full/sys/path/to/cert/file'
# ca: '/full/sys/path/to/ca/file'
slack:
active: false
username: 'username'
hook: 'https://hooks.slack.com/services/'
channel: '#channel'
webhook:
active: false
host: 'localhost'
port: 9200
# use_https: false
# path: ':/{{payload.watcher_id}}'
# body: '{{payload.watcher_id}}{payload.hits.total}}'
# method: POST
report:
active: false
executable_path: '/usr/bin/chromium' # path to Chrome v59+ or Chromium v59+
timeout: 5000
# authentication:
# enabled: true
# mode:
# searchguard: false
# xpack: false
# basic: false
# custom: true
# custom:
# username_input_selector: '#username'
# password_input_selector: '#password'
# login_btn_selector: '#login-btn'
# file:
# pdf:
# format: 'A4'
# landscape: true
# screenshot:
# width: 1280
# height: 900
pushapps:
active: false
api_key: ''
That's it!!! Let's start Kibana to configure watcher and alerting in SentiNL.
Creating Watchers and alerting in Kibana
We will be configuring watcher for different users logged in from same IP address and will send e-Mail alerts.
-
Open Kibana dashboard on your local machine (Url for Kibana on my local machine is http://localhost:5601).
-
Click on SentiNL option in the left nav-pane. You will see a dashboard as below. Click on the New option to create a new watcher.
-
Click on the Watcher link highlighted as below.
-
Enter watcher name and schedule in the General tab.
-
Click on Input tab and enter below mentioned query json in the body. You can also give a name to the query and save.
{ "search": { "request": { "index": [ "app-events*" ], "body": { "query": { "bool": { "filter": [ { "range": { "@timestamp": { "gte": "now-30m" } } }, { "query_string": { "default_field": "appEvent.eventType", "query": "LOGIN_SUCCESS OR LOGIN_FAILURE" } } ] } }, "aggs": { "group_by_requestIP": { "terms": { "field": "appEvent.requestIP.keyword", "size": 5 }, "aggs": { "group_by_identifier": { "terms": { "field": "appEvent.identifier.keyword", "size": 5 }, "aggs": { "get_latest": { "terms": { "field": "@timestamp", "size": 1, "order": { "_key": "desc" } } } } } } } } } } } } -
Click on Condition tab and enter below mentioned condition json in the body. You can also give a name to this condition and save.
{ "script": { "script": "var requestIPbuckets = payload.aggregations.group_by_requestIP.buckets; payload.collector = []; requestIPbuckets.filter(function(requestIP) { return requestIP.key; }).forEach(function(requestIP) { var requestIPKey = requestIP.key; var users = requestIP.group_by_identifier.buckets; if (users.length > 1) { users.filter(function(user) { return user.key; }).forEach(function(user) { payload.collector.push({ 'ip': requestIPKey, 'identifier': user.key, 'count': user.doc_count }); }); }}); payload.collector.length > 0;" } } -
Click on Action tab and select email as an action for alerting. Give title, to, from, subject and add below mentioned content in the body of email.
Found {{payload.collector.length}} Events {{#payload.collector}} {{#.}} ip : {{ip}}, identifier: {{identifier}}, count: {{count}} {{/.}} {{/payload.collector}} - Save the watcher.
This watcher will run periodically based on the schedule that you have set and if the condition for breach is met, will send an email alert. The configured email looks like below.
This is how you can watch real-time changing data in Elasticsearch index and raise alerts based on the configured conditions.
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