Operations

Assessing Data Ingest Volume

You can use the Panther API metrics operations to measure the total number of bytes and events that Panther ingested or processed over a specific time period. For other methods of assessing data ingestion volume, see the sections below.

SaaS deployments of Panther

Please reach out to your Panther account team for help accessing this data.

Self-Hosted and CPaaS deployment of Panther

The Panther log analysis CloudWatch dashboard provides deep insight into operationally relevant aspects of log processing. Understanding the ingest volume is critically important to forecast the cost of running Panther.

In the Dashboard of your Panther Console, you can view the volume of logs ingested. This can be used, in combination with your AWS bill, to forecast costs as you scale your data. We suggest you use a month of data to estimate your costs.

To view the CloudWatch dashboard:

1. Log in to the AWS Console.

2. Click CloudWatch from the Services menu.

3. Click Dashboards from the left sidebar of the CloudWatch console.

4. Click the dashboard name beginning with PantherLogAnalysis

5. Click the three dots icon in upper right corner of the tile titled "Input MBytes (Uncompressed) by Log Type". In the dropdown menu, click View in CloudWatch Insights.

6. Set the time period for 4 weeks, then click Apply.

7. At the top of the Logs Insights page, click Run Query.

s3sns tool

Panther provides s3sns, an operational tool that lists S3 objects and posts S3 notifications to the Panther log processor SNS topic. This tool is a statically compiled executable for Linux, Mac (including Darwin) and Windows.

This tool requires that AWS credentials be set in the environment with sufficient privileges. We recommend a tool to manage these securely such as AWS Vault.

Downloading the latest version of the s3sns tool

Find download links for the latest version of s3sns below. Running these commands with the -h flag will explain usage.

Downloading a specific version of the s3sns tool

If you'd like to download the latest version of the s3sns tool, use the download links above. If you'd like to download a specific version of a tool, follow the instructions below.

Step 1: Confirm your Panther version

1. Log in to the Panther Console.

2. In the upper right corner, click your user icon. Note the Panther version at the bottom of the dropdown menu.

   

Step 2: Construct the download link

To download a specific version of s3sns, construct the S3 download URL manually, using the following format:

https://panther-community-us-east-1.s3.amazonaws.com/{version}/tools/{os}-{arch}-s3sns{windows file extension}.zip Replace the placeholder text in the download URL as described below:

• version: Your version of Panther, e.g. v1.114.90. Be sure to include v before the version number.

  • latest can replace version to download the latest version of the tool.

• os: Use one of the following: darwin, linux , or windows

• arch: Use amd64 or arm64

• {windows file extension}: If your os value is windows, add .exe here. If your os value is darwin or linux, do not add anything here.

Example complete tool link using {version} https://panther-community-us-east-1.s3.amazonaws.com/v1.114.90/tools/darwin-amd64-s3sns.zip

Example download link using latest

https://panther-community-us-east-1.s3.amazonaws.com/latest/tools/darwin-amd64-s3sns.zip

Monitoring

Visibility

Panther has 5 CloudWatch dashboards to provide visibility into the operation of the system:

• PantherOverview An overview of all errors and performance of all Panther components.

• PantherCloudSecurity: Details of the components monitoring infrastructure for CloudSecurity.

• PantherAlertProcessing: Details of the components that relay alerts for CloudSecurity and Log Processing.

• PantherLogAnalysis: Details of the components processing logs and running rules.

• PantherRemediation: Details of the components that remediate infrastructure issues.

Alarms

Panther uses CloudWatch Alarms to monitor the health of each component. Edit the deployments/panther_config.yml file to associate an SNS topic you have created with the Panther CloudWatch alarms to receive notifications. If this value is blank then Panther will associate alarms with the default Panther SNS topic called panther-alarms:

MonitoringParameterValues:
  # This is the arn for the SNS topic you want associated with Panther system alarms.
  # If this is not set alarms will be associated with the SNS topic `panther-alarms`.
  AlarmSNSTopicARN: 'arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:05060362XXX:MyAlarmSNSTopic'

To configure alarms to send to your team, follow the guides below:

• SNS Email and SMS Integration

• PagerDuty Integration

  Note: Pager Duty cannot handle composite CloudWatch alarms, which Panther uses to avoid duplicate pages to oncall staff. As a workaround, you can use a Custom Event Transformer.

  Follow the instructions using the below code:

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     var details = JSON.parse(PD.inputRequest.rawBody);
  
     var description = "unknown event";
     if ("AlarmDescription" in details) {  // looks like a CloudWatch event ...
       var descLines = details.AlarmDescription.split("\n");
       description = (descLines.length > 1)? descLines[0] + " " + descLines[1] : descLines[0];
     }
  
     var normalized_event = {
       event_type: PD.Trigger,
       description: description,
       incident_key: description,
       details: details
     };
  
     PD.emitGenericEvents([normalized_event]);

  Configure the SNS topic to use RawMessageDelivery: true when creating the Pager Duty subscription.