Office 365 moduleedit

This functionality is in beta and is subject to change. The design and code is less mature than official GA features and is being provided as-is with no warranties. Beta features are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

This is a module for Office 365 logs received via one of the Office 365 API endpoints. It currently supports user, admin, system, and policy actions and events from Office 365 and Azure AD activity logs exposed by the Office 365 Management Activity API.

The ingest-geoip and ingest-user_agent Elasticsearch plugins are required to run this module.

Read the quick start to learn how to configure and run modules.

Configure the moduleedit

You can further refine the behavior of the o365 module by specifying variable settings in the modules.d/o365.yml file, or overriding settings at the command line.

Variable settingsedit

Each fileset has separate variable settings for configuring the behavior of the module. If you don’t specify variable settings, the o365 module uses the defaults.

For advanced use cases, you can also override input settings. See Override input settings.

When you specify a setting at the command line, remember to prefix the setting with the module name, for example, o365.audit.var.paths instead of audit.var.paths.

audit fileset settingsedit

The audit fileset uses the Office 365 Management Activity API to retrieve audit messages from Office 365 and Azure AD activity logs. These are the same logs that are available under Audit Log Search in the Security and Compliance Center.

Setupedit

To use this fileset you need to enable Audit Log Search and register an application in Azure AD.

Once this application is registered note the Application (client) ID and the Directory (tenant) ID. Then configure the authentication in the Certificates & Secrets section.

Example configuration o365.yml using client-secret authentication:

  audit:
    enabled: true
    var.application_id: "<My Azure AD Application ID>"
    var.tenants:
      - id: "<My Tenant ID>"
        name: "mytenant.onmicrosoft.com"
    var.client_secret: "<My client secret>"

Certificate-based authentication is specially useful when monitoring multiple tenants. Example configuration:

  audit:
    enabled: true
    var.application_id: "<My Azure AD Application ID>"
    var.tenants:
      - id: "<Tenant A ID>"
        name: "tenantA.onmicrosoft.com"
      - id: "<Tenant B ID>"
        name: "tenantB.onmicrosoft.com"
    var.certificate: "/path/to/certificate.pem"
    var.key: "/path/to/private_key.pem"
    var.key_passphrase: "my_passphrase" # (optional) for encrypted keys

Finally you need to add permissions in the API permissions section and grant it admin consent. Click on Add permission and select Office 365 Management APIs. The needed permissions are:

  • User.Read
  • ActivityFeed.Read
  • ActivityFeed.ReadDlp
  • ServiceHealth.Read
filebeat o365 azure permissions

Once the required permissions are added, click the Grant admin consent button. Note that it can take a while for the required permissions to be in effect, so it’s possible that you observe some permission errors when running Filebeat right away.

Alternative endpointsedit

This module supports custom endpoints for on-prem deployments as well as alternative endpoints (GCC High endponts, U.S. DoD, European Union, etc). In order to point the module to an alternative endpoint, you need to adjust the authentication_endpoint and resource variables accordingly. For example:

    var.api:
      # default is https://login.microsoftonline.com/
      authentication_endpoint: https://login.microsoftonline.us/
      # default is https://manage.office.com
      resource: https://manage.office365.us
Configuration optionsedit
var.application_id
The Application ID (also known as client ID) of the Azure application.
var.tenants
A list of one or more tenant IDs and name pairs. Set the id field to the tenant ID (also known as Directory ID). Set the name to the host name for the tenant, that is, the Office 365 domain for your organization.
var.client_secret
The client-secret (api_key) used to authenticate your Azure AD application. This option cannot be specified at the same time as the var.certificate option.
var.certificate
Path to the certificate file used for client authentication. This option cannot be specified at the same time as the var.client_secret option.
var.key
Path to the private key file used for client authentication.
var.key_passphrase
The passphrase used to decrypt an encrypted key stored in the configured var.key file. Only set this option when the key is encrypted.
var.content_type

The list of content-types to subscribe to. By default, it subscribes to all known content-types:

  • Audit.AzureActiveDirectory
  • Audit.Exchange
  • Audit.SharePoint
  • Audit.General
  • DLP.All
Advanced configuration optionsedit

The following configuration options are only recomended in case of problems. They must be nested under a single var.api key, like this:

    var.api:
      authentication_endpoint: https://login.microsoftonline.com/
      resource: https://manage.office.com
      max_retention: 168h
      poll_interval: 3m
      max_requests_per_minute: 2000
      max_query_size: 24h
var.api.authentication_endpoint
The authentication endpoint used to authorize the Azure app. This is https://login.microsoftonline.com/ by default, and can be changed to access alternative endpoints.
var.api.resource
The API resource to retrieve information from. This is https://manage.office.com by default, and can be changed to access alternative endpoints.
var.api.max_retention
The maximum data retention period to support. 168h by default. Filebeat will fetch all retained data for a tenant when run for the first time. The default is 7 days, which matches the standard period that Microsoft will keep the logs before deleting them. Only increase it if your tenant has a longer retention period.
var.api.poll_interval
The interval to wait before polling the API server for new events. Default 3m.
var.api.max_requests_per_minute
The maximum number of requests to perform per minute, for each tenant. The default is 2000, as this is the server-side limit per tenant.
var.api.max_query_size
The maximum time window that API allows in a single query. Defaults to 24h to match Microsoft’s documented limit.

Example dashboardedit

This module comes with a sample dashboard:

filebeat o365 audit

Fieldsedit

For a description of each field in the module, see the exported fields section.