When faced with a bombardment of threats and a severe resource shortage, the best way to keep your organization ahead of a damaging attack is to make the most of what you have. You need your team and tools to perform at their best to secure your network and ensure your security program is getting buy-in from top-level executives.
The ability to measure the effectiveness of your resources is crucial to the survival of your security team and the health of your overall organization. That’s why LogRhythm is delivering three new tools that trend your security data, measure your security operation center (SOC) efficiency, and help you effectively plan for the future.
Assessing Your SOC
Your chief security information officer (CISO) wants to understand the progress and pain points of your SOC to truly assess where your security team stands and where investments need to be made. As a team, are you constantly improving? Are you only seeing a few incidents in your network because you’re running a tight ship, or because you’re missing events?
CISOs require deep visibility into security information and event management (SIEM) and overall SOC performance to properly allocate resources. SOC managers also need to understand how you’re using your SIEM to plan and budget. Your team must be aware of the log volume and capacity of your SIEM.
For example, if your IT and security teams operate separately, you might be managing more logs than initially intended. Your IT team might need to bring in a new system, which in turn, generates more logs than your SIEM was originally designed to handle. If such a trend continues, SOC managers must plan to renew or add to your current security tools to manage the influx of log data. In doing so, managers need insight into the volume of logs you are managing.
Visualize and Trend Data with the Centralized Metrics Tool
To better manage your log and data volume, you need a tool that can dig into your dashboard and uncover these rich insights. LogRhythm is introducing a new tool — called LogRhythm Centralized Metrics — that can help.
LogRhythm Centralized Metrics pulls data off of each host in your LogRhythm deployment to gather critical service statistics, such as the log volume being processed and log processing queue sizes. The tool then compiles this telemetry and metrics’ data into your dashboard so you can visualize the data in a single interface.
Figure 1: LogRhythm Centralized Metrics’ main dashboards are customizable and visualize data in one user interface
You can view and analyze statistics from all of the hosts in your deployment in one spot, which allows you to easily look for trends over time and compare different systems. LogRhythm Centralized Metrics lets you take a more proactive approach to deployment health monitoring — you can gather trends over time and get in front of SOC issues before they become a serious problem.
Figure 2: LogRhythm Centralized Metrics’ host view allows you to look for trends over time
LogRhythm Centralized Metrics are coming soon! They will be pre-installed and pre-configured in LogRhythm 7.4. Install 7.4 and you will soon be able to start realizing the benefits of centralized metrics.
Identifying SOC Problems with the Diagnostic Tool
A SIEM is a complex system. As a result, it may be hard to detect operational issues when one exists. But tools exist to help you identify issues when they arise. For example, LogRhythm’s Diagnostic Tool gathers and analyzes data to identify tools or services in your LogRhythm deployment that are not operating at optimal efficiency.
The diagnostic tool recognizes when a disk is full or a necessary service has stopped working. It gives your team visibility into what needs to be fixed or updated within your SOC and minimizes the time your SIEM spends operating at a suboptimal level. This tool assesses hosts and services within the LogRhythm deployment and not those operating outside of LogRhythm.
The LogRhythm Diagnostic Tool is currently available to download on the LogRhythm Community, and updates are coming regularly. This tool is backwards compatible and can collect data from previous versions of LogRhythm, such as LogRhythm 7.2 or 7.3.
Gaining Actionable Insights with the SOC Metrics App
Beyond operational issues, your SOC managers need better insight into alarms and the data from them. LogRhythm’s SOC Metrics App is the tool you need.
LogRhythm’s SOC Metrics App collects data from alarm and case databases, and then presents it in an easy-to-view fashion to SOC managers. Managers can then uncover performance trends and measure overall SOC effectiveness. Beyond alerting managers to the sheer number of alarms, the LogRhythm SOC Metrics App offers such insights such as the volume per alarm/AIE rule, which analyst responded, and response time.
The app provides visibility into the value of each alarm and case, so SOC managers can truly understand the manpower required to resolve a specific event. You can then apply these metrics and insights to understand what is working in your SOC, identify areas of improvement, and shorten your overall response times.
Figure 3: The LogRhythm SOC Metrics App provides different views, such as a case metrics dashboard
Figure 4: The LogRhythm SOC Metrics App’s log volume dashboard
The LogRhythm SOC Metrics App is a standalone app available for download on the LogRhythm Community, but will be updated in the near future. LogRhythm customers can write and edit their own queries to pull specific data into the app, which can then be visualized via Kibana. With the LogRhythm SOC Metrics App, you’ll have full flexibility on both ends of the spectrum — you can modify and add your own data and then customize visualization and reporting to fit your needs.
Maximizing SOC Effectiveness with LogRhythm Tools
Your SIEM needs to function at its highest capacity for your SOC to be fully effective. However, every security organization encounters unplanned events and issues that could inhibit SIEM performance. You may have an influx of unexpected logs, run into lengthy log queues, or fill up a disk. No matter the cause, the SIEM and the technology tools with which it integrates might face disruptions, and you need to be able to resolve these issues in a timely manner.
LogRhythm’s tools not only help you resolve and anticipate technological issues, they also give you access to customized performance metrics. You can fully understand your capabilities and trend threat responses, enabling you to better allocate your resources. LogRhythm’s new tools will keep your SIEM operating at peak efficiency and ensure your team’s time is well spent so that your security operations stays ahead of threats.