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Decode CEF

Serverless

Elastic Cloud Serverless projects are autoscaled environments, fully managed by Elastic and available on Elastic Cloud.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

Serverless interfaces and procedures might differ from classic Elastic Stack deployments.

Stack

The Elastic Stack includes Elastic's core products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

Unless stated otherwise on the page, this functionality is available when your Elastic Stack is deployed on Elastic Cloud Hosted, Elastic Cloud Enterprise, Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, and self-managed environments.

This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.

The decode_cef processor decodes Common Event Format (CEF) messages. It follows the specification defined in Micro Focus Security ArcSight Common Event Format, Version 25. This processor is available in Filebeat. This is an example CEF message.

CEF:0|SomeVendor|TheProduct|1.0|100|connection to malware C2 successfully stopped|10|src=192.0.2.10 dst=203.0.113.2 spt=31224

Any content that precedes CEF: is ignored. This allows the processor to directly parse CEF content from messages that contain syslog headers.

Below is an example configuration that decodes the message field as CEF after renaming it to event.original. It is best to rename message to event.original because the decoded CEF data contains its own message field.

YAML 
processors:
  - rename:
      fields:
        - {from: "message", to: "event.original"}
  - decode_cef:
      field: event.original

The decode_cef processor has the following configuration settings.

Name Required Default Description
field no message Source field containing the CEF message to be parsed.
target_field no cef Target field where the parsed CEF object will be written.
ecs no true Generate Elastic Common Schema (ECS) fields from the CEF data. Certain CEF header and extension values will be used to populate ECS fields.
timezone no UTC IANA time zone name (e.g. America/New_York) or fixed time offset (e.g. +0200) to use when parsing times that do not contain a time zone. Local may be specified to use the machine’s local time zone.
ignore_missing no false Ignore errors when the source field is missing.
ignore_failure no false Ignore failures when the source field does not contain a CEF message.
ignore_empty_values no false Ignore CEF extensions with empty values (e.g. spt= type=1)
id no An identifier for this processor instance. Useful for debugging.