Sourcefire developed Snort, an open source intrusion prevention system capable of real-time traffic analysis and packet logging. Snort was acquired (and is now supported) by Cisco in 2013.
If a colleague was looking to tighten down their network I can easily recommend Snort to them. It gives you some more peace of mind knowing that its always scanning traffic for malicious looking code. Even things your major firewalls and security hardware might miss, Snort has picked up. Its an easy recommendation for me.
Perfect for projects where Elasticsearch makes sense: if you decide to employ ES in a project, then you will almost inevitably use LogStash, and you should anyways. Such projects would include: 1. Data Science (reading, recording or measure web-based Analytics, Metrics) 2. Web Scraping (which was one of our earlier projects involving LogStash) 3. Syslog-ng Management: While I did point out that it can be a bit of an electric boo-ga-loo in finding an errant configuration item, it is still worth it to implement Syslog-ng management via LogStash: being able to fine-tune your log messages and then pipe them to other sources, depending on the data being read in, is incredibly powerful, and I would say is exemplar of what modern Computer Science looks like: Less Specialization in mathematics, and more specialization in storing and recording data (i.e. Less Engineering, and more Design).
Logstash design is definitely perfect for the use case of ELK. Logstash has "drivers" using which it can inject from virtually any source. This takes the headache from source to implement those "drivers" to store data to ES.
Logstash is fast, very fast. As per my observance, you don't need more than 1 or 2 servers for even big size projects.
Data in different shape, size, and formats? No worries, Logstash can handle it. It lets you write simple rules to programmatically take decisions real-time on data.
You can change your data on the fly! This is the CORE power of Logstash. The concept is similar to Kafka streams, the difference being the source and destination are application and ES respectively.
As I said earlier, for a production-grade OpenStack Telco cloud, Logstash brings high value in flexibility, compliance, and troubleshooting efficiency. However, this brings a higher infra & ops cost on resources, but that is not a problem in big datacenters because there is no resource crunch in terms of servers or CPU/RAM
For our organization, the Cisco defense in depth concept works the best. While Cisco can be made to work with other vendors, we have found the best in depth protection by integrating Cisco products for maximum visibility. We had a Barracuda Web Filter, but it was difficult to maintain when you had limited scope on what you could block, so we created a whitelist only setup which required a lot of additional manpower. This wouldn't have covered new threats with DNS spoofing and the like. Sourcefire also integrated with our anti-malware platform (Cisco AMP) for even better visibility on what may be happening on the end users workstation. We are planning on adding in Cisco ISE to complete the approach and possibly stealthwatch to cover our bases in the future. The Palo Alto gear was interesting, but it was priced far out of our range.
Logstash can be compared to other ETL frameworks or tools, but it is also complementary to several, for example, Kafka. I would not only suggest using Logstash when the rest of the ELK stack is available, but also for a self-hosted event collection pipeline for various searching systems such as Solr or Graylog, or even monitoring solutions built on top of Graphite or OpenTSDB.
Positive: LogStash is OpenSource. While this should not be directly construed as Free, it's a great start towards Free. OpenSource means that while it's free to download, there are no regular patch schedules, no support from a company, no engineer you can get on the phone / email to solve a problem. You are your own Engineer. You are your own Phone Call. You are your own ticketing system.
Negative: Since Logstash's features are so extensive, you will often find yourself saying "I can just solve this problem better going further down / up the Stack!". This is not a BAD quality, necessarily and it really only depends on what Your Project's Aim is.
Positive: LogStash is a dream to configure and run. A few hours of work, and you are on your way to collecting and shipping logs to their required addresses!
