Skip to main content

Export Teleport Audit Events to Panther

Report an Issue

Teleport's Event Handler plugin receives audit events from the Teleport Auth Service and forwards them to your log management solution, letting you perform historical analysis, detect unusual behavior, and form a better understanding of how users interact with your Teleport cluster.

Panther is a cloud-native security analytics platform. In this guide, we'll explain how to forward Teleport audit events to Panther using Fluentd.

How it works​

The Teleport Event Handler is designed to communicate with Fluentd using mTLS to establish a secure channel. In this setup, the Event Handler sends events to Fluentd, which forwards them to S3 to be ingested by Panther.

Prerequisites​

  • A Panther account.
  • Fluentd version v1.12.4 or greater. The Teleport Event Handler will create a new fluent.conf file you can integrate into an existing Fluentd system, or use with a fresh setup.
  • An S3 bucket to store the logs. Panther will ingest the logs from this bucket.
  • A server, virtual machine, Kubernetes cluster, or Docker environment to run the Teleport Event Handler plugin.

This guide requires you to have completed one of the Event Handler setup guides:

The instructions below demonstrate a local test of the Event Handler plugin on VM. You will need to adjust paths, ports, and domains for other environments.

Step 1/3. Create a Dockerfile with Fluentd and the S3 plugin​

To send logs to Panther, you need to use the Fluentd output plugin for S3. Create a Dockerfile with the following content:

FROM fluent/fluentd:edge
USER root
RUN fluent-gem install fluent-plugin-s3
USER fluent

Build the Docker image:

docker build -t fluentd-s3 .
Testing Locally?

If you're running Fluentd in a local Docker container for testing, you can adjust the entrypoint to an interactive shell as the root user, so you can test the setup.

docker run -u $(id -u root):$(id -g root) -p 8888:8888 -v $(pwd):/keys -v \$(pwd)/fluent.conf:/fluentd/etc/fluent.conf --entrypoint=/bin/sh -i --tty  fluentd-s3

Configure Fluentd for Panther​

We will modify the fluent.conf file generated in the prerequisite setup guide. This file needs to be updated to send logs to Panther. This means adding a <filter> and <match> section to the file. These sections will filter and format the logs before sending them to S3, The record_transformer is important to send the right date and time format for Panther.

<!--
# Below code is commented out as it's autogenerated in step 4 by teleport-event-handler
fluent.conf 
This is a sample configuration file for Fluentd to send logs to S3. 
Created by the Teleport Event Handler plugin. 
Add the <filter> and <match> sections to the file.
 <source>
     @type http
     port 8888

     <transport tls>
         client_cert_auth true
         ca_path "/keys/ca.crt"
         cert_path "/keys/server.crt"
         private_key_path "/keys/server.key"
         private_key_passphrase "AUTOGENERATED"
     </transport>

     <parse>
       @type json
       json_parser oj

       # This time format is used by Teleport Event Handler.
       time_type string
       time_format %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S
     </parse>

     # If the number of events is high, fluentd will start failing the ingestion
     # with the following error message: buffer space has too many data errors.
     # The following configuration prevents data loss in case of a restart and
     # overcomes the limitations of the default fluentd buffer configuration.
     # This configuration is optional.
     # See https://docs.fluentd.org/configuration/buffer-section for more details.
     <buffer>
       @type file
       flush_thread_count 8
       flush_interval 1s
       chunk_limit_size 10M
       queue_limit_length 16
       retry_max_interval 30
       retry_forever true
  </buffer>
</source>
-->
<filter test.log>
  @type record_transformer
  enable_ruby true
  <record>
    time ${time.utc.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")}
  </record>
</filter>
<match test.log>
  @type s3
  aws_key_id  REPLACE_aws_access_key
  aws_sec_key  REPLACE_aws_secret_access_key
  s3_bucket  REPLACE_s3_bucket
  s3_region us-west-2
  path teleport/logs
  <buffer>
    @type file
    path /var/log/fluent/buffer/s3-events
    timekey 60
    timekey_wait 0
    timekey_use_utc true
    chunk_limit_size 256m
  </buffer>
  time_slice_format %Y%m%d%H%M%S
  <format>
    @type json
    </format>
</match>
<match session.*>
  @type stdout
</match>

Start the Fluentd container:

docker run -p 8888:8888 -v $(pwd):/keys -v $(pwd)/fluent.conf:/fluentd/etc/fluent.conf fluentd-s3

This will start the Fluentd container and expose port 8888 for the Teleport Event Handler to send logs to.

Step 2/3. Run the Event Handler plugin​

In this section, you will modify the Event Handler configuration you generated and run the Event Handler to test your configuration.

Configure the Event Handler​

Edit the configuration for the Event Handler, depending on your installation method.

Earlier, we generated a file called teleport-event-handler.toml to configure the Teleport Event Handler. This file includes setting similar to the following:

storage = "./storage"
timeout = "10s"
batch = 20
# concurrency is the number of concurrent sessions to process. By default, this is set to 5.
concurrency = 5
# The window size configures the duration of the time window for the event handler
# to request events from Teleport. By default, this is set to 24 hours.
# Reduce the window size if the events backend cannot manage the event volume
# for the default window size.
# The window size should be specified as a duration string, parsed by Go's time.ParseDuration.
window-size = "24h"
# types is a comma-separated list of event types to search when forwarding audit
# events. For example, to limit forwarded events to user logins
# and new Access Requests, you can assign this field to
# "user.login,access_request.create".
types = ""
# skip-event-types is a comma-separated list of audit log event types to skip.
# For example, to forward all audit events except for new app deletion events,
# you can include the following assignment:
# skip-event-types = ["app.delete"]
skip-event-types = []
# skip-session-types is a comma-separated list of session recording event types to skip.
# For example, to forward all session events except for malformed SQL packet
# events, you can include the following assignment:
# skip-session-types = ["db.session.malformed_packet"]
skip-session-types = []

[forward.fluentd]
ca = /home/bob/event-handler/ca.crt
cert = /home/bob/event-handler/client.crt
key = /home/bob/event-handler/client.key
url = "https://fluentd.example.com:8888/test.log"
session-url = "https://fluentd.example.com:8888/session"

[teleport]
addr = teleport.example.com:443
identity = "identity"

Update the following fields.

[teleport]

addr: Include the hostname and HTTPS port of your Teleport Proxy Service or Teleport Enterprise Cloud account: teleport.example.com:443

identity: Fill this in with the path to the identity file you exported earlier.

If you are providing credentials to the Event Handler using a tbot binary that runs on a Linux server, make sure the value of identity in the Event Handler configuration is the same as the path of the identity file you configured tbot to generate, /opt/machine-id/identity.

[forward.fluentd]

ca: Include the path to the CA certificate: /home/bob/event-handler/ca.crt

cert: Include the path to the Fluentd client certificate. /home/bob/event-handler/client.crt

key: Include the path to the Fluentd client key. /home/bob/event-handler/client.key

url: Include the Fluentd URL where the audit event logs will be sent.

session-url: Include the Fluentd URL where the session logs will be sent.

Start the Event Handler​

Start the Teleport Event Handler by following the instructions below.

Copy the teleport-event-handler.toml file to /etc on your Linux server. Update the settings within the toml file to match your environment. Make sure to use absolute paths on settings such as identity and storage. Files and directories in use should only be accessible to the system user executing the teleport-event-handler service such as /var/lib/teleport-event-handler.

Next, create a systemd service definition at the path /usr/lib/systemd/system/teleport-event-handler.service with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=Teleport Event Handler
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/teleport-event-handler start --config=/etc/teleport-event-handler.toml --teleport-refresh-enabled=true
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
PIDFile=/run/teleport-event-handler.pid

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

If you are not using Machine & Workload Identity to provide short-lived credentials to the Event Handler, you can remove the --teleport-refresh-enabled true flag.

Enable and start the plugin:

sudo systemctl enable teleport-event-handler
sudo systemctl start teleport-event-handler
Choose when to start exporting events

You can configure when you would like the Teleport Event Handler to begin exporting events when you run the start command. This example will start exporting from May 5th, 2021:

teleport-event-handler start --config /etc/teleport-event-handler.toml --start-time "2021-05-05T00:00:00Z"

You can only determine the start time once, when first running the Teleport Event Handler. If you want to change the time frame later, remove the plugin state directory that you specified in the storage field of the handler's configuration file.

Once the Teleport Event Handler starts, you will see notifications about scanned and forwarded events:

sudo journalctl -u teleport-event-handler
DEBU   Event sent id:f19cf375-4da6-4338-bfdc-e38334c60fd1 index:0 ts:2022-09-2118:51:04.849 +0000 UTC type:cert.create event-handler/app.go:140...

The Logs view in Panther should now report your Teleport cluster events.

Step 3/3. Configure Panther to ingest logs from S3​

Once logs are being sent to S3, you can configure Panther to ingest them. Follow the Panther documentation to set up the S3 bucket as a data source.

Troubleshooting connection issues​

If the Teleport Event Handler is displaying error logs while connecting to your Teleport Cluster, ensure that:

  • The certificate the Teleport Event Handler is using to connect to your Teleport cluster is not past its expiration date. This is the value of the --ttl flag in the tctl auth sign command, which is 12 hours by default.
  • In your Teleport Event Handler configuration file, you have provided the correct host and port for the Teleport Proxy Service.
  • Start the Fluentd container prior to starting the Teleport Event Handler. The Event Handler will attempt to connect to Fluentd immediately upon startup.

Next steps​