Snort mailing list archives
Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort
From: Mike Lococo <mikelococo () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 14:23:34 -0400
On 05/13/2011 01:53 PM, beenph wrote:
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Martin Holste <mcholste () gmail com> wrote:16!??! I currently monitor a link that has a daily peak of about 1.5 gigabits per second of actual traffic with 4 snort-processes, and I run about 7000 rules selected from VRT and ET with close to zero packet-loss.Ha, that's what I thought until a few months ago. Then I started running heartbeat signatures and found out just how much packet drop stats lie (from all sources, really). I outlined basics on how to do this on my last blog post at ossectools.blogspot.com. In addition to performance validation, heartbeat sigs are also a great method for hooking Snort up to Nagios (or whatever monitoring setup you're using) to verify that the entire alert reporting chain is working (i.e. Nagios alert if you haven't seen the heartbeat).I honestly still think that a "heartbeat" signature is not a real solution.
Not a real solution to what problem? I don't think anyone is positioning heartbeats as a complete solution for monitoring snort performance that is superior in every way when compared to every other possible alternative. It can be a useful data-point, though. It can be especially useful, if as Martin suggests, you observe drops of a large-fraction of heartbeats in spite of monitoring a variety of other metrics that all appear healthy. Heartbeats won't tell you where the problem is or what it is, but an end-to-end test that includes all the infrastructure that snort depends on but can't be aware of could be a great indicator for problems that would otherwise be very difficult to reliably observe.
For example, if someone pull's the wire from your monitoring station and plug it back 10 minutes later, the only thing you would know is that mabey you missed one of your heartbeat signature and if your heartbeat signature passed right before that, then you would think everything was all right when it fact you where not monitoring for 10 minutes. It could also be an issue more upstream like your trunk that get's disconnected etc etc. And those wouldn't add up in the "droped packets" since whats not seen is not counted thus is not missed.
Snort has lots of other instrumentation that would make the first-case obvious, but the second case could be difficult to detect if you don't have control of the upstream devices feeding snort and heartbeats would help you know that you should be looking for a problem. Cheers, Mike Lococo ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Achieve unprecedented app performance and reliability What every C/C++ and Fortran developer should know. Learn how Intel has extended the reach of its next-generation tools to help boost performance applications - inlcuding clusters. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devmay _______________________________________________ Snort-users mailing list Snort-users () lists sourceforge net Go to this URL to change user options or unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/snort-users Snort-users list archive: http://www.geocrawler.com/redir-sf.php3?list=snort-users
Current thread:
- Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Mike Lococo (May 12)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Martin Holste (May 12)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Mike Lococo (May 12)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Will Metcalf (May 12)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Mike Lococo (May 12)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Martin Holste (May 13)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Mike Lococo (May 13)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Martin Holste (May 13)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Mike Lococo (May 13)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort beenph (May 13)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Mike Lococo (May 13)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort beenph (May 13)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Martin Holste (May 13)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort beenph (May 13)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Mike Lococo (May 13)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Mike Lococo (May 12)
- Re: Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Martin Holste (May 12)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Intel X520 and Multi-Queue Snort Mike Lococo (May 12)