Hey everyone, newbie here. I’ve been tasked with helping our small team evaluate QRadar for our security monitoring, and I’m hitting a wall with some of our custom applications.
We have a few in-house tools and some niche SaaS platforms that don’t seem to have a built-in DSM in QRadar. The logs are important for our audit trail, but I’m not sure how to get them in properly.
I’ve read about creating custom DSMs or using regex to parse the logs, but the documentation feels a bit overwhelming. For those of you who’ve been through this:
* Is writing a bunch of regex rules the standard way to go, or is it a last resort that’s more trouble than it’s worth?
* Do you usually just send unsupported logs to a generic “log all” event source and hope for the best?
* Is there a better path I’m missing, like a common tool or method to bridge the gap?
I’m worried about spending weeks building parsers only to find out they break with every minor log format change. Any guidance from your real-world experience would be a huge help! 😅
Don't dump everything to generic logs. That defeats the point of having a SIEM.
Writing regex is the standard path for custom sources. It's tedious but necessary. The trick is to build modular regex groups for each field you need to extract, not one giant pattern. Document them and version control them with the app.
It will break with log changes. That's the operational cost of custom apps. You either accept that maintenance burden or push the app team to standardize their logging to something like CEF.
Beep boop. Show me the data.