The AWS VPC Flow integration allows you to monitor Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs. Flow logs capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in a VPC.

Use the AWS VPC Flow integration to collect logs related to your Amazon VPCs. Then visualize that data in Kibana, create alerts to notify you if something goes wrong, and reference logs when troubleshooting an issue.

For example, you could use this data to:

• Diagnose overly restrictive security group rules
• Monitor the traffic that is reaching your instance
• Determine the direction of the traffic to and from the network interfaces

Then you can alert the relevant project manager about those events by email.

IMPORTANT: Extra AWS charges on AWS API requests will be generated by this integration. Please refer to the AWS integration for more details.

Data streams

The AWS VPC Flow integration collects one type of data: logs.

Logs help you keep a record of events happening in your VPCs. Logs collected by the vpcflow integration include the packet-level (original) source and destination IP addresses for the traffic, accepted traffic, rejected traffic, and more. See more details in the Logs reference.

Requirements

You need Elasticsearch for storing and searching your data and Kibana for visualizing and managing it. You can use our hosted Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud, which is recommended, or self-manage the Elastic Stack on your own hardware.

Before using any AWS integration you will need:

• AWS Credentials to connect with your AWS account.
• AWS Permissions to make sure the user you're using to connect has permission to share the relevant data.

For more details about these requirements, please take a look at the AWS integration documentation.

Setup

Use this integration if you only need to collect IP traffic data for your VPCs.

If you want to collect data from two or more AWS services, consider using the AWS integration. When you configure the AWS integration, you can collect data from as many AWS services as you'd like.

For step-by-step instructions on how to set up an integration, see the Getting started guide.

For more information on implementation, see the Amazon documentation on:

• Default Flow Log Format
• Custom Format with Traffic Through a NAT Gateway
• Custom Format with Traffic Through a Transit Gateway

This integration supports various plain text VPC flow log formats:

• The default pattern of 14 version 2 fields
• A custom pattern including all 29 fields, version 2 though 5:

${version} ${account-id} ${interface-id} ${srcaddr} ${dstaddr} ${srcport} ${dstport} ${protocol} ${packets} ${bytes} ${start} ${end} ${action} ${log-status} ${vpc-id} ${subnet-id} ${instance-id} ${tcp-flags} ${type} ${pkt-srcaddr} ${pkt-dstaddr} ${region} ${az-id} ${sublocation-type} ${sublocation-id} ${pkt-src-aws-service} ${pkt-dst-aws-service} ${flow-direction} ${traffic-path}

Advanced options

CloudWatch

The CloudWatch logs input has several advanced options to fit specific use cases.

Latency

AWS CloudWatch Logs sometimes takes extra time to make the latest logs available to clients like the Agent.

The CloudWatch integration offers the latency setting to address this scenario. Latency translates the query's time range to consider the CloudWatch Logs latency. For example, a 5m latency means the integration will query CloudWatch for logs available 5 minutes ago.

Number of workers

If you are collecting log events from multiple log groups using log_group_name_prefix, you should review the value of the number_of_workers.

The number_of_workers setting defines the number of workers assigned to reading from log groups. Each log group matching the log_group_name_prefix requires a worker to keep log ingestion as close to real-time as possible. For example, if log_group_name_prefix matches five log groups, then number_of_workers should be set to 5. The default value is 1.

Logs reference

Note: The Parquet format is not supported.

Exported fields

An example event for vpcflow looks as following:

{
    "data_stream": {
        "namespace": "default",
        "type": "logs",
        "dataset": "aws.vpcflow"
    },
    "destination": {
        "port": 22,
        "address": "2001:db8:1234:a102:3304:8879:34cf:4071",
        "ip": "2001:db8:1234:a102:3304:8879:34cf:4071"
    },
    "source": {
        "address": "2001:db8:1234:a100:8d6e:3477:df66:f105",
        "port": 34892,
        "bytes": 8855,
        "packets": 54,
        "ip": "2001:db8:1234:a100:8d6e:3477:df66:f105"
    },
    "tags": [
        "preserve_original_event"
    ],
    "network": {
        "community_id": "1:hXZclvxUJScaVf0xMIJR6yW6tBQ=",
        "transport": "tcp",
        "type": "ipv6",
        "bytes": 8855,
        "iana_number": "6",
        "packets": 54
    },
    "cloud": {
        "provider": "aws",
        "account": {
            "id": "123456789010"
        }
    },
    "@timestamp": "2016-10-31T11:37:00.000Z",
    "ecs": {
        "version": "8.0.0"
    },
    "related": {
        "ip": [
            "2001:db8:1234:a100:8d6e:3477:df66:f105",
            "2001:db8:1234:a102:3304:8879:34cf:4071"
        ]
    },
    "event": {
        "ingested": "2021-09-28T19:10:43.075027100Z",
        "original": "2 123456789010 eni-1235b8ca123456789 2001:db8:1234:a100:8d6e:3477:df66:f105 2001:db8:1234:a102:3304:8879:34cf:4071 34892 22 6 54 8855 1477913708 1477913820 ACCEPT OK",
        "kind": "event",
        "start": "2016-10-31T11:35:08.000Z",
        "end": "2016-10-31T11:37:00.000Z",
        "type": [
            "connection"
        ],
        "category": [
            "network"
        ],
        "outcome": "success"
    },
    "aws": {
        "vpcflow": {
            "action": "ACCEPT",
            "account_id": "123456789010",
            "log_status": "OK",
            "interface_id": "eni-1235b8ca123456789",
            "version": "2"
        }
    }
}

Changelog