Re: [Syslog] draft-cloud-log-00 / CEE - why not IPFIX?

["Heinbockel, Bill" <[e-mail]>]

Thanks for that, I did not realize that IPFIX had been extended beyond its netflow 
past.

I don't have the time now, but I am interested in looking into it further. It does 
kind of remind me of ASN.1/SNMP, where we need to worry about the names/OID 
translation

Also, a lot of vendors and users seem to prefer the ease of text-based protocols 
like Syslog for logging. I am not saying this is good or bad, but it seems to be 
the sweetspot -- binary is not natively human readable and XML has too much 
overhead.


William Heinbockel
The MITRE Corporation


>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jeroen Massar [mailto:[e-mail]]
>Sent: Wednesday, 16 February 2011 05:35
>To: Heinbockel, Bill
>Cc: [e-mail]; Chris Lonvick; Gene Golovinsky; Sam Johnston; Common
>Event Expression
>Subject: Re: [Syslog] draft-cloud-log-00 / CEE - why not IPFIX?
>
>On 2011-02-16 06:21, Heinbockel, Bill wrote:
>> From what I understand, IPFIX is for expression of IP flows from network
>sensing
>> devices.
>
>For a short bit forget about the history of IPFIX, it indeed comes from
>NetFlow, and thus is used quite in a network centric way, but
>effectively it is a structured streaming data format.
>
>> Could you please explain how IPFIX is relevant to event and cloud logging
>data?
>> I understand how CEE and IPFIX may overlap for describing networking
>events, but
>> it is unclear to me how IPFIX could handle things like Windows Event Logs
>and
>> RHEL audit logs.
>
>There are two parts to IPFIX: Templates + Data
>
>The template describes how the data looks like, for instance, lets take
>an Apache CLF log entry:
>
>66.249.66.174 - - [16/Feb/2011:10:48:11 +0100] "GET /robots.txt
>HTTP/1.1" 200 2629 "-" "Googlebot-Image/0"
>
>We can make an IPFIX template for that
>
>[
>	{4, IPv4_SRC },
>	{4, TIMESTAMP},
>	{4, HTTP_METHOD},
>	{v, URL},
>	{v, HTTP_PROTOCOL},
>	{2, HTTP_RESULT},
>	{8, OCTETS},
>	{v, HTTP_REFER},
>	{v, HTTP_USERAGENT},
>]
>
>The 'v' markers indicate variable fieldlengths, the others indicates the
>number of bytes such a field takes. The data is then just encoded in the
>above format, presto.
>
>The above is a simple example, one can also have repeating lists and of
>course you could make a variable template which just includes the fields
>that you actually want to look at or you could already do some
>aggregation and add other fields. Templates are only sent every now and
>then, as they should not change. The data is the important bit.
>
>The fieldnames are actually numbers in the data, thus very compact, and
>are mapped to descriptions, data types etc, per a nice XML file
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipfix/ipfix.xml (or .xhtml or .txt for
>a more human readable version ;) for the official IANA list and with the
>help of Enterprise IDs any others can easily be added.
>
>The big advantage is that you can more or less do static templates if
>you want and you only need one single parser on the collector side, thus
>one does not have to create another parser and collector again for
>decoding other protocols, just one, the IPFIX one, and you can optimize
>that really well for all kinds of scenarios.
>
>Greets,
> Jeroen