Forum Discussion
Sentinel & Cisco Meraki?
Hi, after working with the MS support team and their dev's, they determined that Meraki logs don't follow the RFC standard for syslog message. Basically, what is happening is at the first = in the syslog message, Sentinel dropping everything before it and the remainder of the message get captured.
The workaround for this was to have rsyslog write the Meraki logs to a file then we have Sentinel ingest the files into a custom log table. You will want to have log rotation setup to ensure that it does not grow infinitely. Here are the config notes I have. To have Sentinel pull the custom log, that is configured in Log Analytics under Advanced settings.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Configure Log Rotate
Create directory:
sudo mkdir /var/log/meraki
Assign permission on folder:
sudo chown syslog /var/log/meraki
Create log rotation configuration file:
vi /etc/logrotate.d/meraki
/var/log/meraki/meraki {
rotate 3
missingok
create 0640 syslog adm
notifempty
compress
size 100M
delaycompress
sharedscripts
postrotate
/usr/lib/rsyslog/rsyslog-rotate
endscript
}
Configure rsyslog to send meraki logs to file:
vi /etc/rsyslog.conf
Add the following line at the bottom
if ($fromhost-ip=='172.16.15.254') then /var/log/meraki/meraki
- tales80Jul 22, 2025Copper Contributor
I saw this but this doesn't seem right. The table to query the data isn't CiscoMeraki.
- UnifiedJDJun 10, 2021Copper Contributor
JKatzmandu good thread, the solution worked well to get the data separated. The only issue here is Sentinel has 0 analytics for Meraki, none of their scheduled/ML/Anomaly analytics will every query that table so I am going to work on getting the data into CommonSecurityLog in hopes it might catch something.
- JKatzmanduJan 08, 2021Brass Contributor
I use it when we query; so instead of "Cisco_Meraki_CL" as the "table" in my search, it's this function...
- mhaasEFDDec 05, 2020Copper ContributorAre you running this function when you query? or can this be used at collection without having to create individual custom fields?
- mhaasEFDNov 23, 2020Copper ContributorThanks,
I got syslog up and running already but looking over your info. I did setup a CEF output from my graylog server and found that cleaner but if you don’t need an internal graylog server it’s probably an extra step. - JKatzmanduNov 23, 2020Brass Contributor
I've done this Meraki recipe for two customers; it comes in via syslog, syslog puts it into its own file, it's read as a Custom Log by the Log Analytics Agent and is forwarded into Sentinel. Then within Sentinel we have a KQL function to extract the most common stuff. What's frustrating is that Cisco Meraki isn't always the most consistent with the log format.
Here's my GitHub with the extractors, which I have no problem with anyone else using, and if you guys have fixes, I'm happy to incorporate them:
https://github.com/jkatzmandu/sentinel_tricks