Getting Data In

WEF-forwarded events metadata and non-defined input

PickleRick
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

Hi there

I'm trying hard to make sense of events forwarded by WEF/WEC and collected by UF.

I have a WEF subscription that forwards events from a host called "WinDev2102Eval" to a host "testdziura".

On that host I have a UF installed along with Splunk_TA_windows app.

I have an input defined quite normally:

[WinEventLog://ForwardedEvents]
evt_resolve_ad_obj = 0
checkpointInterval = 5
current_only = 0
disabled = 0
start_from = oldest
index = winevents
renderXml = true
host=WinEventLogForwardHost

There is nothing out of the ordinary.

The events that come from the WEC host iself are shown as having host field set to "testdziura" (as configured in system/local/inputs.conf), the events collected from the other host are shown with host "WinDev2102Eval". Which is OK from the logical point of view.

I don't understand though how I can match those WEF-forwarded events in props.conf (I need to perform some additional transforms for a subset of those events).

Adding stanza [host::testdziura] applies only to events generated locally on the WEC host, not to those collected into Forwarded Events.

Stanza [host::WinDev2102Eval] simply doesn't work.

Surprisingly [source::WinEventLog:ForwardedEvents] applies to those forwarded events but this definition is way too broad for me.

What I'm trying to understand is how the hell it all works. Because I don't see that source (WinEventLog:ForwardedEvents) anywhere near the events in question. In my quest for understanding I even resorted to dumping the network traffic (for debug purposes I don't use TLS in my lab) and got completely puzzled since the only metadata that seems to be getting sent with the event is the source, which is a location of splunk-winevtlog.exe (and thus completely different from the working stanza shown above) and destination index _MetaData:Index winevents. I suppose that host::testdziura is getting set by default from the general connection properties (I can see it presented at the beginning of the UF to Indexer connection).

So I'm completely lost here. Where is this ForwardedEvent source coming from? Why isn't my [host::] stanza not working? And what should I put there to make it work?

For debug purposes I did a simple transform that rewrites MetaData:Host into a Original_Host field so I thought I would see what splunk sees. But it's even more confusing since the events show Original_Host having value "host::WinDev2102Eval".

Another question which got me puzzled is that I don't seem to have any input for the "typical" event logs (System, Application, Setup) explicitly defined (all those defined in Splunk_TA_windows/default/inputs.conf have disabled=1) but I'm still getting the events (and btools inputs list shows the inputs with disabled=0). What did I miss?

 

Best regards,

MK

Labels (2)
0 Karma

PickleRick
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

OK. It seems that after I changed the input on UF to a different host value (not that WinEventLogForwardHost), the Indexer finally noticed that. The downside is that now the computer name is not getting extracted from the event data into the host field but that I can do myself I suppose. But it's still confusing.

0 Karma
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