Part 2: Setting up Log Analytics on Datadog for QNAP NAS

In Part 2, we walk-through how to set up log parsing in Datadog for the QNAP NAS logs that the Datadog agent has been shipping out. This is an important step to allow filtering logs for troubleshooting, as well as creating facets for slicing, dicing and analyzing log data.

If you haven’t read Part 1: Setting up Log Analytics on Datadog for QNAP NAS yet, and arrived at this post without any clue as to how you got here, I highly recommend starting there.

To make your experience of this post better, here are some tips:

  • There are a number of screenshots in this post which may seem a bit small on their own. Click on them to pop-up a lightbox with an enlarged image. No, you don’t need a magnifying glass.
  • For easy understanding, we’ll split this out into the “Before”, “Setting Up”, and “After” sections.

Before Parsing Custom Logs

On the Datadog platform, navigate to Logs -> Search to get to the Log Explorer. Select only the qnap-nas Service facet. If you remember from Part 1, we had this Service configured on the agent configuration file. It might be a good idea to choose a longer time frame to view logs; In this case, we looking at logs from the “The Past Hour”. To generate some log activity, I logged into my NAS to start an antivirus scan as well as run a rapid test on one of the hard disks.

Yay logs.

Clicking into any of the log lines, it’s soon clear that while the logs exist, the data is not actually parsed for easy slicing and dicing, which will be immensely useful if we want to perform log analysis and filtering. It would be nice to extract inline data into easy to use attributes.

No attributes, no fun.

Setting Up Custom Log Parsing

Navigate to Logs -> Configuration. Obseve that there are already a number of existing log parsing pipelines which come out of the box (Wait, do we have boxes for a SaaS?). These are automatically turned on when an associated monitoring integration is enabled. Did I mention that Datadog has 400+ vendors-supported integrations already available, and chances are that whatever you want to integrate for monitoring/tracing/log analytics is already here? Consider it said 🙂 And now, lets add on a custom log pipeline, just cuz we can. Click on “Add a new pipeline”.

To add a new log pipeline, click on “Add a new pipeline”. Whew, how hard was that?

First, we need to filter out log lines that we want to send through our QNAP log pipeline for parsing. We’ll simply use service:qnap-nas as our filter criteria. If you recall, we configured the agent in Part 1 to tag this attribute to all logs that come in from the QNAP NAS. Give this pipeline an easily distinguishable name; “QNAP NAS”, for example.

I call the pipeline “QNAP NAS”, just because.

Once the pipeline exists to snag the right logs, we need to apply some actions to the logs in order to parse it. In this case, the actions are called “Processors”. Click on “Add Processor”.

Add a “New Processor”, professor.

A pop-up appears to help configure the “New Processor”. For Step 1, let’s leave it as the default “Grok Parser”, because we are going to use Grok to extract attributes of interest. In Step 2, return to the “Log Explorer” screen to copy out a few log samples which will be used to test our parsing rules. From observation, there appear to two types of QNAP NAS logs; An event log type and a connection log type. Notice that all of the log samples have a red “No Match” indicator next to them, meaning we can’t extract any useful attributes yet.

Copy and paste in some sample logs from the QNAP NAS so we can test the Grok parsing rules

Going down to Step 3, place in the parsing rules. I’ve provided the rules in text format after the next screenshot, so you can easily copy/paste them for your own use. Essentially, we have main/general parsing rules for both types of logs. For readability, these will in turn call modular “Helper Rules” that need to be added in “Advanced Settings”. These “Helper Rules” will work their magic on specific sub-strings depending on where they are placed by the main parsing rules.

What a load of Grok!

Here are the main rules in text form; You can copy/paste this in into the Step 3 text box as in the screenshot above.

QNAP_Conn %{QNAP_initial} %{QNAP_conn_log}
QNAP_Event %{QNAP_initial} %{QNAP_event_log}

And here are the “Helper Rules”, which get called by the main rules. Pop open the “Advanced Settings” drop-down and copy/paste these in. If you’re curious, “QNAP_initial” will match and parse the beginning of every QNAP log, while “QNAP_conn_log” and “QNAP_event_log” will respectively match and parse connection or event logs, depending on what comes after the initial part of the log line.

QNAP_initial \<%{number:priority}\>%{date("MMM dd HH:mm:ss"):date}\s+%{ipOrHost:host}\s+%{word:process_name}\[%{number:process_id}\]\:

QNAP_conn_log conn\s+log\:\s+Users\:\s+%{word:user},\s+Source\s+IP\:\s+%{ip:source_ip},\s+Computer\s+name\:\s+%{data:computer_name},\s+Connection\s+type\:\s+%{word:connection_type},\s+Accessed\s+resources\:\s+%{data:accessed_resources},\s+Action\:\s+%{data:action}

QNAP_event_log event\s+log\:\s+Users\:\s+%{word:user},\s+Source\s+IP\:\s+%{ip:source_ip},\s+Computer\s+name\:\s+%{data:computer_name},\s+Content\:\s+%{data:msg}

Scrolling back up, notice that that all the sample log messages now show the “Match” in green.

We have a green slate

To see how well parsing works, select any of the sample log lines, and scroll down past Step 3 to see what attributes have been successfully parsed.

These values are all extracted from the sample log line, and assigned to attributes. It’s kinda like a key-value pair.

It works! Let’s clean up by giving the processor a name and saving it into the log pipeline.

It’s a log parser, what else could you call it?

If all goes well, we should now see the “QNAP NAS Log Parser” log processor attached to the QNAP NAS log pipeline.

Pipeline ready!

After: Slice and Dice Log Data like a Pro

So the net is now cast, let’s see what we can catch! Return to the Log Explorer and filter for service:qnap-nas. Click on any of the recent logs, and observe that we now have attributes which have been extracted from the raw log line by the QNAP NAS Log Parser. The next screenshot shows the data extracted from a user’s action of writing a file on the NAS using Windows File Share.

More attributes than you can shake a stick at! (please don’t shake sticks at stuff)

We want to set these attributes as facets in order to index, slice and dice the logs. Let’s start with the “action” attribute, since this is a useful log facet that tells us what action a user performed. Mouse over the left area of each attribute, then look out for a small settings icon (symbol of a gear). Click on it to pop open a menu.

Mouse over, and click… Side note here, Pomplamoose covers are awesome and you should check them out on Youtube.

Select “Create facet for @action” from the menu…

Create a new facet

… Which will pop-up a confirmation dialog. No changes needed here, just click on the “Add” button. Repeat the steps to add facets with the “computer_name”, “connection_type”, “host”, “source_ip”, and “user” attributes.

Hurry up and click “Add” already

Observe that once these attributes have been added as facets, they now appear on the facet selector/menu on the left. You can see a list of facet values for manipulating the log view now.

Options, options, and more options. Options are good.

For example, let’s use the “user” facet to select ONLY the “admin” user. This will show a list of all logs that are related to the “admin” user, and filter everything else out.

This “admin” guy looks suspicious, let’s see what he’s been up to.

Observe that the “user:admin” term is now added automatically to the search bar, and that the visible logs are only those which are caused by the “admin” user. In this case, it’s a list of files that is being accessed by the user.

Apparently “admin” enjoys a cover of a Jim Croce song. Great taste!

Having facets is also fantastic for running log analytics. Say for example, I wanted to understand what actions are frequently performed on the NAS by users. It’s easy to click on the “graph” icon on the “action” facet.

… and “ACTION!”

With that simple click, a visualization of all the actions performed on the NAS by the users within the selected timeframe is displayed. Here we can see that by far the most frequently performed operation by the NAS is the “Read” operation.

So the users seem to like reading files off the NAS. Color me surprised…

There’s a lot more that can be done now that we’re able to parse the QNAP NAS logs, like adding this to a dashboard of related applications or systems, or setting up monitoring and alerting against specific thresholds. It’s all up to your imagination!

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