Reduce and Transform Your Firewall Data with Splunk Data Management

[rederada]

Managing high-volume firewall data has always been a challenge. Noisy events and verbose traffic logs often slow down searches, eat into license usage, and make it difficult to extract real value.

That’s why we’ve created two new Splunk Lantern articles to help you get more out of your Cisco ASA and Palo Alto Networks (PAN) firewall data with Data Management Pipeline Builders (Edge Processor & Ingest Processor). These guides walk you through simple, step-by-step workflows using SPL2 pipeline templates, so you can reduce log noise and make your data cleaner, leaner, and more valuable..

What are Edge Processor and Ingest Processor?

Splunk’s Data Management Pipeline Builders give you two powerful ways to preprocess and shape your data before it hits your indexes:

• Edge Processor (EP)
  This is a customer-hosted, on-premises (or edge) component where you can run SPL2 pipeline logic close to your data source. Use it to filter, mask, enrich and route data before it leaves your network.
  
  
• Ingest Processor (IP)
  This is a Splunk-hosted cloud offering (available in Splunk Cloud) that applies SPL2 pipelines at the ingestion point. It lets you do the same filtering, masking, transforming, routing and additionally supports converting logs to metrics without managing infrastructure yourself.
  

These EP and IP components use SPL2-based pipeline templates (prebuilt logic you can customize) to simplify the work of tailoring firewall log flows, reducing noise, improving structure, and optimizing costs.

Reduce Noise in Cisco ASA Data

If you’re ingesting logs from Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), you know the pain: mountains of low-priority logs flood your system, obscuring the events that matter most.

Our new Lantern article; Reducing Cisco ASA data with Splunk’s Edge Processor and Ingest Processor - shows you how to:

• Filter out unnecessary events using pre-built pipeline templates
• Improve search performance by focusing only on high-value ASA logs
• Save on license usage by cutting down ingestion of low-priority messages
  

With just a few clicks, you can preview, test and deploy a pipeline that drops the noise and routes only meaningful events to your Splunk indexes.

Transform Your PAN Firewall Data

Palo Alto Networks (PAN) firewall logs generate massive syslog streams. Without filtering or classification, you can quickly rack up license consumption costs by indexing large volumes of unoptimized data.

The result? Limited field extractions and poor classification that don’t tell the whole story.

Our new Lantern article; Transforming your PAN firewall data with Splunk’s Data Management Pipeline Builders - will help you:

• Classify PAN logs automatically with the built-in PAN classification template
• Extract fields and apply correct source types for better visibility
• Route events to the right indexes for cleaner searches and analysis
• Optimize log size with another template to reduce cost and storage

In minutes, you’ll see your firewall events reshaped into well-structured data, ready for analysis.

Why It Matters

Clean, optimized firewall data helps you:

• Detect threats faster with better visibility
• Run searches and dashboards more efficiently
• Keep ingestion and license costs under control

And the best part? Splunk makes it easy with pipeline templates that can be deployed in just a few steps.

Get Started Today

Whether you’re running Cisco ASA or Palo Alto Networks data in, these step-by-step guides will show you how to maximize value from your data. Start optimizing your firewall data today and unlock faster, cleaner insights in Splunk.

Check out the full articles on Splunk Lantern:

• Reducing Cisco ASA Data with Splunk
  
  
• Transforming PAN Firewall Data with Splunk