8.1 Rules Overview

The Rules interface provides the ability to define rules to evaluate all incoming events and deliver selected events to designated output channels.For example, each severity 5 event can be e-mailed to a security analysts distribution list or an administrator.

NOTE:All events are also delivered to the database.

An incoming event is evaluated against each filtering rule in order until a match is found, and then the delivery actions associated with that rule are executed:

Send to e-mail: Send the event to a user or users by using a configured SMTP relay

Write to File: Write the event to a specified file on the Identity Audit server

Send to Syslog: Forward the event to a configured syslog server

HINT:Events are processed by the associated actions one at a time. You should therefore consider performance implications when selecting which output channel to which events are sent. For example, the Write to File action is the least resource-intensive, so it can be used to test rule criteria to determine the data volume before sending a flood of events to e-mail or syslog.

Also, when you set up the Send to e-mail action, you should consider how many events the recipient can effectively handle and adjust the filtering on the rule accordingly.

Event output is in JavaScript* Object Notation (JSON) which is a lightweight data exchange format. Events consist of field names (such as “evt” for Event Name) followed by a colon and a value (such as “Start”), separated by commas.

{"st":"I","evt":"Start","sev":"1","sres":"Collector","res":"CollectorManager","rv99":"0","rv1":"0","repassetid":"0","rv77":"0","agent":"Novell SecureLogin","obsassetid":"0","vul":"0","port":"Novell SecureLogin","msg":"Processing started for Collector Novell SecureLogin (ID D892E9F0-3CA7-102B-B5A1-005056C00005).","dt":"1224204655689","id":"751D97B0-7E13-112B-B933-000C29E8CEDE","src":"D892E9F0-3CA7-102B-B5A2-005056C00004"}