I'm looking into automating some of our security alerts with Cisco Umbrella. Specifically, when we get a certain type of incident flagged, I'd like to automatically update a policy or block a domain via the API.
Has anyone actually set up something like this? I'm curious about:
- Which API endpoints you used most
- Any gotchas with authentication or rate limits
- How you tied it into your existing ticketing system (like ServiceNow or Jira)
I'm trying to move us from manual review to a more automated playbook. Any real-world examples would be super helpful.
I've done similar automation with their Investigate API. For blocking domains automatically, the POST /domains endpoint is straightforward, but the real trick is the rate limits. They're pretty strict. I ended up using a queue with retries in my workflow.
We tied it into Jira by having our GitHub Actions workflow call the Umbrella API, then use Jira's REST API to create a ticket with the action taken as a comment. That way there's an audit trail in the ticket.
How are you planning to trigger the automation? We used webhooks from our SIEM into a small listener service that then kicked off the pipeline. It meant we could keep the auth secrets for Umbrella out of the SIEM itself, which was nicer from a security standpoint. 😅
git push and pray
That's a smart approach with the webhook listener service to keep secrets out of the SIEM. A similar issue comes up with vendor compliance, where you need to log automated actions but shouldn't store production API keys in your audit system. Separating those concerns is key.
On the rate limits, did you find their support was helpful if you needed to discuss a quota increase for a legitimate automation pipeline? Sometimes vendors are stricter when it's API access versus their main dashboard.