Apache Metron in the Real World

Apache Metron in the Real World

Do you like our work......we hire!

Never miss our publications about Open Source, big data and distributed systems, low frequency of one email every two months.

Apache Metron is a storage and analytic platform specialized in cyber security. This talk was about demonstrating the usages and capabilities of Apache Metron in the real world. The presentation was led by Dave Russell, Principal Solutions Engineer - EMEA + APAC at Hortonworks, at the Dataworks Summit 2018 (Berlin).

Presentation

Apache Metron is a cyber security application framework that provides organizations the ability to ingest, process and store diverse security data feeds in order to detect cyber anomalies and enable them to rapidly respond.

It provides a scalable advanced security analytics framework which is built with Hadoop technologies and is specifically designed to monitor network traffic and machine logs within an organization by continuously consuming live flowing data from a lot of “data in motion” sources.

Metron overview

Apache Metron overview

Metron has a clear and intuitive interface.

Metron interface

Apache Metron interface

For each input we have some useful informations from Metron and we can filter on our own data too.

  • A score to evaluate the level of the threat
  • A timestamp
  • The alert status
  • The threat reason (for eg. “The distinct number of machines that user U22 attempted to login to (2) is more than 5 standard deviations (0.29) from the median (1.00)“)
  • An associated user

Which response does Metron bring?

Currently, data retention time is much lower than the detection time of a breach, the average data retention duration is 6 months while for breach detection it’s 8 months. So we need a system that stores huge amounts of data over several years and that’s where Metron comes in!

Sometime in the next few years we’re going to have out first category-one cyber-incident; one that will need a national response
Ian Levy, Technical Director of National Cyber Security Center

Metron also come with algorithmic parts to detect threats.

Metron interface

Profiling by time

Sizing considerations

For cluster sizing there are several points to consider:

  • Events per second (average and peak)
  • Retention time for Hot/Warm/Cold zones
  • Enrichments
  • Node sizing
  • I/O Considerations
  • PCAP (API for capturing network traffic)

The sizing of a cluster must be progressive:

Data sheet

Metron offers many different solutions to each problem:

Ingest

Parsers

Enrichment and threat feeds

Analytic features

  • Profiler and statistical baselining engine
  • Model Services for advanced ML
  • Threat Triage rules and scoring engine

Index and search features

Data science features

Forensic features

Deploying Metron

Like sizing, deploying a Metron cluster must be progressive.

Metron interface

A fully deployed Apache Metron ecosystem

Share this article

Canada - Morocco - France

We are a team of Open Source enthusiasts doing consulting in Big Data, Cloud, DevOps, Data Engineering, Data Science…

We provide our customers with accurate insights on how to leverage technologies to convert their use cases to projects in production, how to reduce their costs and increase the time to market.

If you enjoy reading our publications and have an interest in what we do, contact us and we will be thrilled to cooperate with you.

Support Ukrain