Tag Archives: serverless

Visualizing AWS Logging Data in Azure Monitor – Part 1

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Visualizing AWS Logging Data in Azure Monitor – Part 1

Hi folks!

2019 is more than halfway over and it feels like it has happened in a flash.  It’s been an awesome year with tons of change and even more learning.  I started the year neck deep in AWS and began transitioning into Azure back in April when I joined on with Microsoft.  Having the opportunity to explore both clouds and learn the capabilities of each offering has been an amazing experience that I’m incredibly thankful for.  As I’ve tried to do for the past 8 years, I’m going to share some of those learning with you.  Today we’re going to explore one of the capabilities that differentiates Azure from its competition.

One of the key takeaways I’ve had from my experiences with AWS and Microsoft is enterprises have become multicloud.  Workloads are quickly being spread out among public and private clouds.  While the business benefits greatly from a multicloud approach where workloads can go to the most appropriate environment where the cost, risks, and time tables best suit it, it presents a major challenge to the technical orchestration behind the scenes.  With different APIs (application programmatic interface), varying levels of compliance, great and not so great capabilities around monitoring and alerting, and a major industry gap in multicloud skills sets, it can become quite a headache to successfully execute this approach.

One area Microsoft Azure differentiates itself is its ability to easy the challenge of monitoring and alerting in a multicloud environment.  Azure Monitor is one of the key products behind this capability.  With this post I’m going to demonstrate Azure Monitor’s capabilities in this realm by walking you through a pattern of delivering, visualizing, and analyzing log data collected from AWS.  The pattern I’ll be demonstrating is reusable for most any cloud (and potentially on-premises) offering.  Now sit back, put your geek hat on, and let’s dive in.

First I want to briefly talk about what Azure Monitor is?  Azure Monitor is a solution which brings together a collection of tools that can be used to collect and analyze the large abundance of telemetry available today.  This telemetry could be metrics in regards to a virtual machine’s performance or audit logs for Azure Active Directory.  The product team has put together the excellent diagram below which explains the architecture of the solution.

As you can see from the inputs on the left, Azure Monitor is capable of collecting and analyzing data from a variety of sources.  You’ll find plenty of documentation the product team has made publicly available on the five gray items, so I’m going to instead focus on custom sources.

For those of you who have been playing in the AWS pool, you can think of Azure Monitor as something similar (but much more robust) to CloudWatch Metrics and CloudWatch Logs.  I know, I know, you’re thinking I’ve drank the Microsft Kool-Aid.

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While I do love to reminisce about cold glasses of Kool-Aid on hot summers in the 1980s, I’ll opt to instead demonstrate it in action and let you decide for yourself.  To do this I’ll be leveraging the new API Microsoft introduced.  The Azure Monitor HTTP Data Collector API was introduced a few months back and provides the capability of delivering log data to Azure where it can be analyzed by Azure Monitor.

With Azure Monitor logs are stored in an Azure resource called a Log Analytics Workspace.  For you AWS folk, you can think of a Log Analytics Workspace as something similar to CloudWatch Log Groups where the data stored in a logical boundary where the data shares a retention and authorization boundary.  Logs are sent to the API in JSON format and are placed in the Log Analytics Workspace you specify.  A high level diagram of the flow can be seen below.

So now that you have a high level understanding of what Azure Monitor is, what it can do, and how the new API works, let’s talk about the demonstration.

If you’ve used AWS you’re very familiar with the capabilities CloudWatch Metrics Dashboards and the basic query language available to analyze CloudWatch Logs.  To perform more complex queries and to create deeper visualizations, third-party solutions are often used such as ElasticSearch and Kibana.  While these solutions work, they can be complex to implement and can create more operational overhead.

When a peer informed me about the new API a few weeks back, I was excited to try it out.  I had just started to use Azure Monitor to put together some dashboards for my personal Office 365 and Azure subscriptions and was loving the power and simplicity of the analytics component of the solution.  The new API opened up some neat opportunities to pipe logging data from AWS into Azure to create a single dashboard I could reference for both clouds.  This became my use case and demonstration of the pattern of delivering logs from a third party to Azure Monitor with some simple Python code.

The logs I chose to deliver to the API were logs containing information surrounding the usage of AWS access ids and keys.  I had previously put together some code to pull this data and write it to an S3 bucket.

Let’s take a look at the design of the solution.  I had a few goals I wanted to make sure to hit if possible.  My first goal was to keep the code simple.  That mean limiting the usage of third-party modules and avoid over complicating the implementation.

My second goal was to limit the usage of static credentials.  If I ran the code in Azure, I’d need to setup an AWS IAM User and provision an access id and secret key.  While I’m aware of the workaround to use SAML authentication, I’m not a fan because in my personal opinion, it’s using SAML in such a way you are trying to hammer in a square peg in a round hole.  Sure you can do it, but you really shouldn’t unless you’re out of options.  Additionally, the solution requires some fairly sensitive permissions in AWS such as IAM:ListAccessKeys so the risk of the credentials being compromised could be significant.  Given the risks and constraints of authentication methods to the AWS API, I opted to run my code as a Lambda and follow AWS best practices and assign the Lambda an IAM role.

On the Azure side, the Azure Monitor API for log delivery requires authentication using the Workspace ID and Workspace key.   Ideally these would be encrypted and stored in AWS Secrets Manager or as a secure parameter in Parameter Store, but I decided to go the easy route and store them as environment variables for the Lambda and to encrypt them with AWS KMS.  This cut back on the code and made the CloudFormation templates easier to put together.

With the decisions made the resulting design is pictured above.

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I’m going to end the post here and save the dive into implementation and code for the next post.  In the meantime, take a read through the Azure Monitor documentation and familiarize yourself with the basics.  I’ve also put the whole solution up on Github if you’d like to follow along for next post.

See you next post!

 

Capturing and Visualizing Office 365 Security Logs – Part 1

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Welcome back again my fellow geeks!

I’ve been busy over the past month nerding out on some pet projects.  I thought it would be fun to share one of those pet projects with you.  If you had a chance to check out my last series, I walked through my first Python experiment which was to write a re-usable tool that could be used to pull data from Microsoft’s Graph API (Microsoft Graph).

For those of you unfamiliar with Microsoft Graph, it’s the Restful API (application programming interface) that is used to interact with Microsoft cloud offerings such as Office 365 and Azure.  You’ve probably been interacting with it without even knowing it if through the many PowerShell modules Microsoft has released to programmatically interact with those services.

One of the many resources which can be accessed through Microsoft Graph are Azure AD (Active Directory) security and audit reports.  If you’re using Office 365, Microsoft Azure, or simply Azure AD as an identity platform for SSO (single sign-on) to third-party applications like SalesForce, these reports provide critical security data.  You’re going to want to capture them, store them, and analyze them.  You’re also going to have to account for the window that Microsoft makes these logs available.

The challenge is they are not available via the means logs have traditionally been captured on-premises by using syslogd, installing an SIEM agent, or even Windows Event Log Forwarding.  Instead you’ll need to take a step forward in evolving the way you’re used to doing things. This is what moving to the cloud is all about.

Microsoft allows you to download the logs manually via the Azure Portal GUI (graphical user interface) or capture them by programmatically interacting with Microsoft Graph.  While the former option may work for ad-hoc use cases, it doesn’t scale.  Instead we’ll explore the latter method.

If you have an existing enterprise-class SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solution such as Splunk, you’ll have an out of box integration.  However, what if you don’t have such a platform, your organization isn’t yet ready to let that platform reach out over the Internet, or you’re interested in doing this for a personal Office 365 subscription?  I fell into the last category and decided it would be an excellent use case to get some experience with Python, Microsoft Graph, and take advantage of some of the data services offered by AWS (Amazon Web Services).   This is the use case and solution I’m going to cover in this post.

Last year I had a great opportunity to dig into operational and security logs to extract useful data to address some business problems.  It was my first real opportunity to examine large amounts of data and to create different visualizations of that data to extract useful trends about user and application behavior.  I enjoyed the hell out of it and thought it would be fun to experiment with my own data.

I decided that my first use case would be Office 365 security logs.  As I covered in my last series my wife’s Office 365 account was hacked.  The damage was minor as she doesn’t use the account for much beyond some crafting sites (she’s a master crocheter as you can see from the crazy awesome Pennywise The Clown she made me for Christmas).

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The first step in the process was determining an architecture for the solution.  I gave myself a few requirements:

  1. The solution must not be dependent on my home lab infrastructure
  2. Storage for the logs must be cheap and readily available
  3. The credentials used in my Python code needs to be properly secured
  4. The solution must be automated and notify me of failures
  5. The data needs to be available in a form that it can be examined with an analytics solution

Based upon the requirements I decided to go the serverless (don’t hate me for using that tech buzzword 🙂 ) route.  My decisions were:

  • AWS Lambda would run my code
  • Amazon CloudWatch Events would be used to trigger the Lambda once a day to download the last 24 hours of logs
  • Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) would store the logs
  • AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store would store the parameters my code used leveraging AWS KMS (Key Management Service) to encrypt the credentials used to interact with Microsoft Graph
  • Amazon Athena would hold the schema for the logs and make the data queryable via SQL
  • Amazon QuickSight would be used to visualize the data by querying Amazon Athena

The high level architecture is pictured below.

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I had never done a Lambda before so I spent a few days looking at some examples and doing the typical Hello World that we all do when we’re learning something new.  From there I took the framework of Python code I put together for general purpose queries to the Microsoft Graph, and adapted it into two Lambdas.  One Lambda would pull Sign-In logs while the other would pull Audit Logs.  I also wanted a repeatable way to provision the Lambdas to share with others and get some CloudFormation practice and brush up on my very dusty Bash scripting.   The results are located here in one of my Github repos.

I’m going to stop here for this post because we’ve covered a fair amount of material.  Hopefully after reading this post you understand that you have to take a new tact with getting logs for cloud-based services such as Azure AD.  Thankfully the cloud has brought us a whole new toolset we can use to automate the extraction and storage of those logs in a simple and secure manner.

In my next post I’ll walk through how I used Athena and QuickSight to put together some neat dashboards to satisfy my nerdy interests and get better insight into what’s happening on a daily basis with my Office 365 subscription.

See you next post and go Pats!