The Websense parser can parse the log messages of Websense Content Gateway (Raytheon|Websense, now Forcepoint).

The messages of these devices often do not completely comply with the syslog RFCs, making them difficult to parse. The websense-parser() of syslog-ng OSE solves this problem, and can separate these log messages to name-value pairs, extracting also the Cisco-specific values, for example, the mnemonic. For details on using value-pairs in syslog-ng OSE see Structuring macros, metadata, and other value-pairs.

The parser can parse messages in the following format:

<PRI><DATE> <TIMEZONE> <IP-ADDRESS> <NAME=VALUE PAIRS>

For example:

<159>Dec 19 10:48:57 EST 192.168.1.1 vendor=Websense product=Security product_version=7.7.0 action=permitted severity=1 category=153 user=- src_host=192.168.2.1 src_port=62189 dst_host=example.com dst_ip=192.168.3.1 dst_port=443 bytes_out=197 bytes_in=76 http_response=200 http_method=CONNECT http_content_type=- http_user_agent=Mozilla/5.0_(Windows;_U;_Windows_NT_6.1;_enUS;_rv:1.9.2.23)_Gecko/20110920_Firefox/3.6.23 http_proxy_status_code=200 reason=- disposition=1034 policy=- role=8 duration=0 url=https://example.com

If you find a message that the websense-parser() cannot properly parse, contact Support, so we can improve the parser.

The syslog-ng OSE application sets the PROGRAM field to Websense.

By default, the websense-specific fields are extracted into name-value pairs prefixed with .websense. For example, the product_version in the previous message becomes ${.websense.product_version}. You can change the prefix using the prefix option of the parser.

Declaration

@version: 3.38
@include "scl.conf"
log {
    source { network(flags(no-parse)); };
    parser { websense-parser(); };
    destination { ... };
};

Note that you have to disable message parsing in the source using the flags(no-parse) option for the parser to work.

The websense-parser() is actually a reusable configuration snippet configured to parse websense messages. For details on using or writing such configuration snippets, see Reusing configuration blocks. You can find the source of the Websense configuration snippet on GitHub.

prefix()

Synopsis: prefix()

Description: Insert a prefix before the name part of the parsed name-value pairs to help further processing. For example:

  • To insert the my-parsed-data. prefix, use the prefix(my-parsed-data.) option.

  • To refer to a particular data that has a prefix, use the prefix in the name of the macro, for example, ${my-parsed-data.name}.

  • If you forward the parsed messages using the IETF-syslog protocol, you can insert all the parsed data into the SDATA part of the message using the prefix(.SDATA.my-parsed-data.) option.

Names starting with a dot (for example, .example) are reserved for use by syslog-ng OSE. If you use such a macro name as the name of a parsed value, it will attempt to replace the original value of the macro (note that only soft macros can be overwritten, see Hard versus soft macros. To avoid such problems, use a prefix when naming the parsed values, for example, prefix(my-parsed-data.)

By default, websense-parser() uses the .websense. prefix. To modify it, use the following format:

parser {
    websense-parser(prefix("myprefix."));
};

Updated: