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GCN Home > 10/08/07 issue

Right on Q

GCN Lab Review: Qradar monitoring appliance gives a clear picture of network problems

By Greg Crowe

No matter what else a computer or appliance does for a network, the one thing it does do with certainty is generate logs. These little snippets of what the device was doing when and with what can be vital to understanding the nature of a problem.

Unfortunately, log files are rarely legible to human beings and the differences in formatting these files makes it difficult to find a single program that can bring the logs for an entire network together in one place.
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AT YOUR FINGERTIPS: This dashboard is the first thing you see when you log in to the console. It gives a good encapsulated view of your network activity.
Even if all of the log files for all of the network servers, clients, gateways, intrusion-detection systems and so forth were brought together to be compiled into one report, the logs usually tell about half the story when they identify a problem.

Network traffic must also be considered, particularly suspicious communication between devices, or between a device on your network and an outside computer. For instance, if a server application log notes that a certain service was started, there is no way to tell if it was authorized.

However, if it is also known that there was communication to that server from an outside source a second or two before that service started, it becomes more likely that the service is the result of some sort of attack.

The Qradar 2100 All-in-One Appliance performs both these vital functions, correlates the data and breaks it down into visually intuitive displays via a Web interface. It supports hundreds of different types of servers and network security devices and can start importing their information after minimal setup.

The Qradar comes as a 2U rack-mountable server with two dual-core Intel Xeon 2.66 GHz processors, with a total of 8G of memory. Its six 146G SAS hot-swappable hard drives are in a RAID5 configuration that produces 730G of usable drive space.

This powerhouse of an appliance should be able to handle up to 50,000 flows and 1,000 events per second, which makes it ideal for a small company or department. We were pleased that the 2100 has two redundant, hot-swappable 750W power supplies. This level of power protection is completely essential in a security appliance.
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RAP SHEET: For each offense, all pertinent data about transactions and events is listed. This allows an administrator to quickly get to the bottom of things.
We were quite pleased to find that the 2100 supports more than 700 devices, which means it is able to easily pull logs from a wide variety of client computers, Web servers, e-mail servers, firewalls and intrusion-detection systems, among others. It can do this in one of two ways.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, IT Security, Hardware



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