In January’s Product Update, we announced our new Universal Data Records architecture, which enables the Kentik Data Engine (our distributed big data backend) to flexibly allocate columns to the flow fields of diverse devices. Our first integration using this new approach was to support the ingest of flow data from Palo Alto Networks firewalls for enhanced operational and security intelligence.

In February we added another integration, this time with Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA). This latest implementation includes:

• Support for the full ASA NetFlow template in group-by and filtering dimensions, Dashboards, and Data Explorer.
• Support for ASA fields in Alert Policy filters.
• Support for ingest of ASA flows both directly and via our Netflow Proxy Agent (chfagent).

Now let’s take a look at the workflow involved in putting ASA data to use in Kentik Detect.

Step 1.

In the Add Device dialog (accessed via the Admin » Devices page), add an ASA as a new device. Make sure to set the Type control to Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance.

Step 2.

In Data Explorer, use the device selector (accessed via the Devices pane in the sidebar) to include the ASA in the set of queried devices.

Step 3.

After you add an ASA in the Devices pane you can open the dimension selector — either for group-by in the Query pane or for ad hoc filters in the Filtering pane — to see and choose ASA-specific dimensions. These dimensions will help you to understand significant events in a flow, and track flow state changes over time.

Putting these new ASA dimensions to work in Kentik Detect will help you to better understand aspects of your traffic — top denied countries, applications, IPs, paths and so on — that are key for robust infrastructure security. One way to take advantage of these dimensions is to build a security-focused dashboard like the one shown below.

You can also use ASA dimensions in the filters that you use for alert policies (see the Data Funneling topic in the KB), which means that you can generate alerts based on firewall events such as unexpected denied traffic.

For more information, please refer to the Kentik Knowledge Base topic on Cisco ASA Dimensions, or contact our Customer Success team.