Category Archives: Splunk

Better OSSEC syslog parsing for Splunk

Just as predicted by the documentation, the syslog parsing of the OSSEC app for Splunk was a bit meh: while it would work in several instances it would terribly fail in others, like HTTP access for example. Below you can find the current version I’m using, which also provide additional fields that can be used for reports.

[ossec-syslog-message]
#REGEX = ossec:.*?(Location:.*;)\s*(user: [^;]+;\s*)?(\w{3} \d+ [\d:]+ \w+ )?(.*)$
#FORMAT = message::$4
REGEX = ossec:.*?(Location: (.*?);)\s*(srcip: ([a-f0-9:\.]+);\s*)?(user: [^;]+;\s*)?([a-f0-9:\.]+ ([a-zA-Z\-]+ [a-zA-Z\-]+) )?(\[\w{3} \w{3} \d+ \d+:\d+:\d+\.\d+ \d+\]\s*|\w{3}$
FORMAT = ossec_location::$2 ossec_srcip::$4 ossec_httpusergroup::$7 ossec_msgtimestamp::$8 message::$9

What you see commented out are the original instructions that can be safely removed. The new REGEX is more complex than the original, maybe too much, but through this I can extract more information that were previously hidden, or not easily accessible, and at the same time remove redundant timestamps while having all the important messages correctly extracted.

If you have suggestions, feel free to comment below.