Santa module

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The santa module collects and parses logs from Google Santa, a security tool for macOS that monitors process executions and can blacklist/whitelist binaries.

When you run the module, it performs a few tasks under the hood:

  • Sets the default paths to the log files (but don’t worry, you can override the defaults)
  • Makes sure each multiline log event gets sent as a single event
  • Uses an Elasticsearch ingest pipeline to parse and process the log lines, shaping the data into a structure suitable for visualizing in Kibana
  • Deploys dashboards for visualizing the log data

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

Compatibility

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The santa module was tested with logs from Santa 0.9.14.

This module is available for MacOS only.

Configure the module

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

You must enable at least one fileset in the module. Filesets are disabled by default.

The module is by default configured to read logs from /var/log/santa.log.

- module: santa
  log:
    enabled: true
    var.paths: ["/var/log/santa.log"]
    var.input: "file"

Variable settings

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Each fileset has separate variable settings for configuring the behavior of the module. If you don’t specify variable settings, the santa 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, santa.log.var.paths instead of log.var.paths.

log fileset settings

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var.paths
An array of glob-based paths that specify where to look for the log files. All patterns supported by Go Glob are also supported here. For example, you can use wildcards to fetch all files from a predefined level of subdirectories: /path/to/log/*/*.log. This fetches all .log files from the subfolders of /path/to/log. It does not fetch log files from the /path/to/log folder itself. If this setting is left empty, Filebeat will choose log paths based on your operating system.

Example dashboard

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This module comes with a sample dashboard showing and overview of the processes that are executing.

kibana santa log overview

Fields

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