Fortigate Firewall
Ship your Fortigate firewall logs using Filebeat to your Logit.io Stack
Configure a Fortigate firewall to ship logs via Filebeat to your Logit.io stacks via Logstash.
Follow this step by step guide to get 'logs' from your system to Logit.io:
Step 2 - Configure Fortigate Logging
Configure the Fortigate firewall to log to a syslog server:
You can configure the Fortigate firewall to log to a syslog server through the web interface or through the CLI. To configure through the web interface, go to "System" -> "Log & Report" -> "Syslog".
From there, you can add a new syslog server and specify the IP address or hostname of the machine running Filebeat.
- Log format: syslog
- Send over: UDP
- IP Address: Your Filebeat server IP address
- Port: 514
To configure through the CLI, run the following commands:
config log syslogd setting
set status enable
set format default
set server <Filebeat_machine_IP_Address>
set port 514
end
Step 3 - Configure Filebeat.yml
The configuration file below is pre-configured to send data to your Logit.io Stack.
Copy the configuration file below and overwrite the contents of the Filebeat configuration file typically located at /etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml
# ============================== Filebeat inputs ===============================
filebeat.inputs:
- type: udp
max_message_size: 10MiB
host: "0.0.0.0:514"
enabled: true
fields:
type:
fields_under_root: true
encoding: utf-8
ignore_older: 12h
# ================================== Outputs ===================================
output.logstash:
hosts: ["your-logstash-host:your-ssl-port"]
loadbalance: true
ssl.enabled: true
If you’re running Filebeat 7, add this code block to the end. Otherwise, you can leave it out.
# ... For Filebeat 7 only ...
filebeat.registry.path: /var/lib/filebeat
If you’re running Filebeat 6, add this code block to the end.
# ... For Filebeat 6 only ...
registry_file: /var/lib/filebeat/registry
It’s a good idea to run the configuration file through a YAML validator to rule out indentation errors, clean up extra characters, and check if your YAML file is valid. Yamllint.com is a great choice.
Step 4 - Validate configuration
If you have issues starting in the next step, you can use these commands below to troubleshoot.
Let's check the configuration file is syntactically correct by running directly inside the terminal.
If the file is invalid, will print an error loading config file
error message with details on how to correct the problem.
deb/rpm
sudo -e -c /etc//.yml
macOS
cd <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>
sudo ./ -e -c .yml
Windows
cd <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>
.\.exe -e -c .yml
Step 5 - Start filebeat
Start or restart to apply the configuration changes.
Step 6 - Launch Logit.io to view your logs
Now you should view your data:
If you don't see logs take a look at How to diagnose no data in Stack below for how to diagnose common issues.
Step 7 - How to diagnose no data in Stack
If you don't see data appearing in your Stack after following the steps, visit the Help Centre guide for steps to diagnose no data appearing in your Stack or Chat to support now.
Step 8 - Fortigate Overview
FortiGate firewalls provide advanced network security features for enterprise environments, protecting against cyber threats and unauthorized access. To effectively monitor and analyze network activity, it is essential to have a reliable and efficient log management solution. Filebeat, a popular open-source shipping tool, is widely used to send logs from FortiGate firewalls to various destinations, including Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, due to its reliability and minimal memory footprint.
Filebeat, which is written in Go, combines key features from Logstash-Forwarder and Lumberjack to generate, parse, tail, and forward common logs within the logging pipeline to be indexed within Elasticsearch. Filebeat is the most popular way to send logs to ELK, out of the entire collection of open-source shipping tools, including Auditbeat, Metricbeat, and Heartbeat. Earlier versions of Filebeat only allowed users to send events to Logstash and Elasticsearch, but recent updates to the shipper have made it compatible with Redis & Kafka.
Sending logs from FortiGate firewalls to Filebeat is a simple process that involves configuring the firewall to forward logs to a syslog server. Once the logs are received by the syslog server, Filebeat can be used to collect and forward log data to Elasticsearch or other destinations.
Filebeat provides a filebeat.yml wizard that helps users avoid complex logging concerns, such as large registry files and frequent errors encountered when handling deleted or renamed log files. Users can also consider our Hosted ELK service to simplify tracking numerous pipelines using this shipper.
In summary, Filebeat is an essential tool for efficiently managing log data from FortiGate firewalls. Its reliability, minimal memory footprint, and compatibility with various destinations make it a popular choice for many organizations. To ensure effective log management and analysis, users should consider configuring FortiGate firewalls to forward logs to Filebeat and taking advantage of the shipper's advanced features.
If you need any further assistance with migrating your log data to ELK we're here to help you get started. Feel free to get in contact with our support team by sending us a message via live chat & we'll be happy to assist.