Cisco ASA Router configuration

A log shipper designed for files.

Configure Filebeat to ship Cisco logs to Logstash and Elasticsearch.

Step 1 - Configure Cisco Router

Enable your Cisco ASA router to send logs to a remote server over TCP. As this isn't enabled by default you will need to enable it, you can follow the instructions here to do so.

Cisco Logs Instructions

Step 2 - Install Filebeat

deb (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint)

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat/filebeat-oss-7.8.1-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i filebeat-oss-7.8.1-amd64.deb

rpm (CentOS/RHEL/Fedora)

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat/filebeat-oss-7.8.1-x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -vi filebeat-oss-7.8.1-x86_64.rpm

macOS

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat/filebeat-oss-7.8.1-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz 
tar xzvf filebeat-oss-7.8.1-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz

Windows

Download the Filebeat Windows zip file from the official downloads page.
Extract the contents of the zip file into C:\Program Files.
Rename the filebeat-<version>-windows directory to Filebeat.
Open a PowerShell prompt as an Administrator (right-click the PowerShell icon and select Run As Administrator). If you are running Windows XP, you may need to download and install PowerShell.
Run the following commands to install Filebeat as a Windows service:

cd 'C:\Program Files\Filebeat'
.\install-service-filebeat.ps1`

If script execution is disabled on your system, you need to set the execution policy for the current session to allow the script to run. For example: PowerShell.exe -ExecutionPolicy UnRestricted -File .\install-service-filebeat.ps1.

My OS isn't here! Don't see your system? Check out the official downloads page for more options (including 32-bit versions).

Step 3 - Locate the configuration file

deb/rpm /etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml
mac/win <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>/filebeat.yml

Step 4 - Configure the inputs

Now in the filebeat.inputs section of the config file. You need to enabe tcp input.

The host is the Filebeat server itself and the port is what you have chosen as the tcp port.

You can then apply additional configuration settings to add an extra field type to all logs that come through this input. This will help us indentify them easily in Elasticsearch/Kibana.

filebeat.inputs:

# Each - is an input. Most options can be set at the input level, so
# you can use different inputs for various configurations.
# Below are the input specific configurations.

- type: tcp
  host: "0.0.0.0:xxxx"
  fields: 
    type: cisco-asa

fields_under_root: true
encoding: utf-8
ignore_older: 3h

Step 5 - Configure output

We'll be shipping to Logstash so that we have the option to run filters before the data is indexed.
Comment out the elasticsearch output block.

## Comment out elasticsearch output
#output.elasticsearch:
#  hosts: ["localhost:9200"]

Uncomment and change the logstash output to match below.

output.logstash:
    hosts: ["your-logstash-host:your-ssl-port"]
    loadbalance: true
    ssl.enabled: true

Step 6 - Validate configuration

Let's check the configuration file is syntactically correct by running filebeat directly inside the terminal. If the file is invalid, filebeat will print an error loading config file error message with details on how to correct the problem.

deb/rpm

sudo filebeat -e -c /etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml

macOS

cd <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>
./filebeat -e -c filebeat.yml

Windows

cd <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>
.\filebeat.exe -e -c filebeat.yml

Step 7 - Start filebeat

Ok, time to start ingesting data!

deb/rpm

sudo systemctl enable filebeat
sudo systemctl start filebeat

mac

./filebeat

Windows

Start-Service filebeat

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