Suricata and OpenObserve Integration

Input and output integration overview

This plugin reports internal performance counters of the Suricata IDS/IPS engine and processes the incoming data to fit Telegraf’s format.

This configuration pairs Telegraf’s HTTP output with OpenObserve’s native JSON ingestion API, turning any Telegraf agent into a first-class OpenObserve collector.

Integration details

Suricata

The Suricata plugin captures and reports internal performance metrics from the Suricata IDS/IPS engine, which includes a wide range of statistics such as traffic volume, memory usage, uptime, and counters for flows and alerts. This plugin listens for JSON-formatted log outputs from Suricata, allowing it to parse and format the data for integration with Telegraf. It operates as a service input plugin, meaning it actively waits for metrics or events from Suricata rather than collecting metrics at predefined intervals. The plugin supports configurations for different metrics versions allowing for enhanced flexibility and detailed data gathering.

OpenObserve

OpenObserve is an open source observability platform written in Rust that stores data cost-effectively on object storage or local disk. It exposes REST endpoints such as /api/{org}/ingest/metrics/_json that accept batched metric documents conforming to a concise JSON schema, making it an attractive drop-in replacement for Loki or Elasticsearch stacks. The Telegraf HTTP output plugin streams metrics to arbitrary HTTP targets; when the "data_format = "json"" serializer is selected, Telegraf batches its metric objects into a payload that matches OpenObserve’s ingestion contract. The plugin supports configurable batch size, custom headers, TLS, and compression, allowing operators to authenticate with Basic or Bearer tokens and to enforce back-pressure without additional collectors. By reusing existing Telegraf agents already collecting system, application, or SNMP data, organizations can funnel rich telemetry into OpenObserve dashboards and SQL-like analytics with minimal overhead, enabling unified observability, long-term retention, and real-time alerting without vendor lock-in.

Configuration

Suricata

[[inputs.suricata]]
  ## Source
  ## Data sink for Suricata stats log. This is expected to be a filename of a
  ## unix socket to be created for listening.
  # source = "/var/run/suricata-stats.sock"

  ## Delimiter
  ## Used for flattening field keys, e.g. subitem "alert" of "detect" becomes
  ## "detect_alert" when delimiter is "_".
  # delimiter = "_"

  ## Metric version
  ## Version 1 only collects stats and optionally will look for alerts if
  ## the configuration setting alerts is set to true.
  ## Version 2 parses any event type message by default and produced metrics
  ## under a single metric name using a tag to differentiate between event
  ## types. The timestamp for the message is applied to the generated metric.
  ## Additional tags and fields are included as well.
  # version = "1"

  ## Alerts
  ## In metric version 1, only status is captured by default, alerts must be
  ## turned on with this configuration option. This option does not apply for
  ## metric version 2.
  # alerts = false

OpenObserve

[[outputs.http]]
  ## OpenObserve JSON metrics ingestion endpoint
  url = "https://api.openobserve.ai/api/default/ingest/metrics/_json"

  ## Use POST to push batches
  method = "POST"

  ## Basic auth header (base64 encoded "username:password")
  headers = { Authorization = "Basic dXNlcjpwYXNzd29yZA==" }

  ## Timeout for HTTP requests
  timeout = "10s"

  ## Override Content-Type to match OpenObserve expectation
  content_type = "application/json"

  ## Force Telegraf to batch and serialize metrics as JSON
  data_format = "json"

  ## JSON serializer specific options
  json_timestamp_units = "1ms"

  ## Uncomment to restrict batch size
  # batch_size = 5000

Input and output integration examples

Suricata

1. Network Traffic Analysis: Utilize the Suricata plugin to track detailed metrics about network intrusion attempts and performance, aiding in real-time threat detection and response. By visualizing captured alerts and flow statistics, security teams can quickly pinpoint vulnerabilities and mitigate risks.

2. Performance Monitoring Dashboard: Create a dashboard using the Suricata Telegraf plugin metrics to monitor the health and performance of the IDS/IPS engine. This use case provides an overview of memory usage, captured packets, and alert statistics, allowing teams to maintain optimal operating conditions.

3. Automated Security Reporting: Leverage the plugin to generate regular reports on alert statistics and traffic patterns, helping security analysts to identify long-term trends and prepare strategic defense initiatives. Automated reports also ensure that the security posture of the network is continually assessed.

4. Real-time Alert Handling: Integrate Suricata’s alert metrics within a broader incident response automation framework. By incorporating the inputs from the Suricata plugin, organizations can develop smart triggers for alerting and automated response workflows that enhance reaction times to potential threats.

OpenObserve

1. Edge Device Health Mirror: Deploy Telegraf on thousands of industrial IoT devices to capture temperature, vibration, and power metrics, then use this output to push JSON batches to OpenObserve. Plant operators gain a real-time overview of machine health and can trigger maintenance based on anomalies without relying on heavyweight collectors.

2. Blue-Green Deployment Canary: Attach a lightweight Telegraf sidecar to each Kubernetes release-candidate pod that scrapes /metrics and forwards container stats to a dedicated “canary” stream in OpenObserve. Continuous comparison of error rates between blue and green versions empowers the CI pipeline to auto-roll back poor performers within seconds.

3. Multi-Tenant SaaS Billing Pipeline: Emit per-customer usage counters via Telegraf and tag them with tenant_id; the HTTP plugin posts them to OpenObserve where SQL reports aggregate usage into invoices, eliminating separate metering services and simplifying compliance audits.

4. Security Threat Scoring: Fuse Suricata events and host resource metrics in Telegraf, deliver them to OpenObserve’s analytics engine, and run stream-processing rules that correlate spikes in suspicious traffic with CPU saturation to produce an actionable threat score and automatically open tickets in a SOAR platform.

Feedback

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