Processing Cortex XDR Syslog/CEF with Graylog

It’s a bit of an odd situation but sometimes you might want to take information from a cloud service in this case Cortex XDR from Palo Alto Networks and drag it into an on premise logging service. This guide will have a look at how to get this log data in as well as parse it such that you can break out the individual fields in the log entry.

In looking at the documentation it appears that the logs are in the Comment Event Format (CEF) but are then wrapped up in syslog for transmission. Although Graylog can absorb CEF directly this additional layer of syslog means we have to take in the syslog and then send the event messages through a processing pipeline in Graylog to extract the CEF data.

So onto the guide – which assume you are familiar with the operation of the Cortex XDR management console and Graylog (shown version is 3.3), for simplicity the code snippet you’ll need is also shown below from GitHub.