User Guide

Passive Monitoring

NetEye’s passive monitoring abilities count on Tornado, a Complex Event Processor that receives reports of events from data sources such as monitoring, email, and telegram, matches them against pre-configured rules, and executes the actions associated with those rules, which can include sending notifications, logging to files, and annotating events in a time series graphing system.

Tornado is a high performance, scalable application, and is intended to handle millions of events each second on standard server hardware. This

Tornado architecture

Fig. 17 Tornado architecture

Tornado Architecture

Tornado is structured as a library, with three example binaries included that show how it can be used. The three main components of the Tornado architecture are:

  • The Tornado Collector(s), or just Collector(s)

  • The Tornado Engine, or Engine

  • The Tornado Executor(s), or Executor(s)*

The term Tornado refers to the whole project or to a deployed system that includes all three components.

Along with the main components, the following concepts are fundamental to the Tornado architecture:

  • A Datasource: A system that sends External Events* to Tornado, or a system to which Tornado subscribes to receive External Events.

  • An External Event: An input received from a datasource. Its format depends on its source. An example of this is events from rsyslog.

  • A Tornado (or Internal) Event: The Tornado-specific Event format.

  • A Rule: A group of conditions that an Internal Event must match to trigger a set of Actions.

  • An Action: An operation performed by Tornado, usually on an external system. For example, writing to Elastic Search or setting a state in a monitoring system.

Architecturally, Tornado is organized as a processing pipeline, where input events move from collectors to the engine, to executors, without branching or returning.

When the system receives an External Event, it first arrives at a Collector where it is converted into a Tornado Event. Then it is forwarded to the Tornado Engine where it is matched against user-defined, composable Rules. Finally, generated Actions are dispatched to the Executors.

The Tornado pipeline:

Datasources (e.g. rsyslog)
  |
  | External Events
  |
  \-> Tornado Collectors
        |
        | Tornado (or Internal) Events
        |
        \-> Tornado Engine (matches based on Rules)
              |
              | Actions
              |
              \-> Tornado Executors (execute the Actions)

Collectors

The purpose of a Collector is to receive and convert external events into the internal Tornado Event structure, and forward them to the Tornado Engine.

Collectors are Datasource-specific. For each datasource, there must be at least one collector that knows how to manipulate the datasource’s Events and generate Tornado Events.

Out of the box, Tornado provides a number of Collectors for handling inputs from snmptrapd, rsyslog, JSON from Nats channels and generic Webhooks.

Because all Collectors are defined with a simple format, Collectors for new event types can easily be added or extended from existing types for:

  • Monitoring events

  • Email messages

  • Telegram

  • DNS

  • Cloud monitoring (AWS, Azure, Cisco/Meraki, etc.)

  • Netflow

  • Elastic Stack

  • SMS

  • Operating system and authorization events

Engine

The Engine is the second step of the pipeline. It receives and processes the events produced by the Collectors. The outcome of this step is fully defined by a processing tree composed of Filters and Rule Sets.

A Filter is a processing node that defines an access condition on the children nodes.

A Rule Set is a node that contains an ordered set of Rules, where each Rule determines:

  • The conditions a Tornado Event has to respect to match it

  • The actions to be executed in case of a match

The processing tree is parsed at startup from a configuration folder where the node definitions are stored in JSON format.

When an event matches one or more Rules, the Engine produces a set of Actions and forwards them to one or more Executors.

Executors

The Executors are the last element in the Tornado pipeline. They receive the Actions produced from the Engine and trigger the associated executable instructions.

An Action can be any command, process or operation. For example it can include: * Forwarding the events to a monitoring system * Logging events locally (e.g., as processed, discarded or matched) or remotely * Archiving events using software such as the Elastic Stack * Invoking a custom shell script

A single Executor usually takes care of a single Action type.

Tornado License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 <LICENSE-APACHE or https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0> or the MIT license <LICENSE-MIT or https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>, at your option. All files in the project carrying such notice may not be copied, modified, or distributed except according to those terms.