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[RFC] Host and Hostname fields - Stage 0 #1512
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[RFC] Host and Hostname fields - Stage 0 #1512
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The
agent.*
fields are meant to describe the software entity collecting events on a host or observer. As a software entity, theagent.hostname
field has been left out intentionally since the hostname is instead an attribute of ahost.*
or anobserver.*
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We have seen evidence of records (observer.) which report on a host (host.) and regarding the agent (agent.*) where the hostnames of each (observer, host, and agent) are unique.
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Do you have an example you'd be willing to share for this discussion?
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@ebeahan
Here is an anonymized representation of the event output from the agent (represented with 123) reporting on the HOST and the other agent deployed on the host (321).
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Hi @hadadata59! Just catching up here and want to verify I understand correctly.
From your example, you have agent 123 and agent 321 and both run on the same host that they are monitoring?
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@kgeller yes. two agents, one host.
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Awesome.
So in this scenario, we would say we are receiving logs from both agent 123 and agent 321 about host 1? If so, could we not just populate the host.name field in both of those sets of logs from the agent?
I don't quite follow how, in this scenario, we'd need additional hostname fields.
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What are thoughts on leveraging the existing
agent.name
to capture the hostname?For example, Beats does this as the default, unless overridden in the configuration: elastic/beats#18000
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This is a single log record (not sets of logs) where the box (host.hostname), the non-reporting 'resident' agent (?) and the reporting agent (agent.hostname) all provide unique hostnames in the record.
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With the
source
/destination
/client
/server
field sets, the address value should populate the.address
field and be duplicated to the appropriate field based on the value:.ip
for IP addresses,.domain
for FQDNs or hostnames.I believe the
.domain
field serves the same function you're proposing here. Or do you have different motivations for proposing this addition?There was a problem hiding this comment.
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Using the example of somehost.example.com as a fully qualified domain name:
where some somehost is the hostname
and example.com is the domain name
See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dns/naming-conventions
There is general confusion when the FQDN can be both .domain as well as host.name.
The point here is to isolate the hostname (I.E. somehost), as well as the domain (.domain) for a more accurate and reliable representation of the data and for ease of user search.
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I think this addition can make sense here.
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Very early drafts of ECS did include
source.hostname
anddestination.hostname
fields, but the project later removed the fields. The discussion was that having bothsource.hostname
andsource.domain
caused confusion, and arguably usinghostname
vs.host
in a network-centric context was incorrect.Here are some of the past conversations, if anyone's curious: #175 #84
Sometimes revisiting past decisions is valuable, though, of course! However, there would be a good bit of work to reassign the
[source|destination|client|server].domain
field's intent; this would be a significant breaking change for ECS.There was a problem hiding this comment.
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Capturing these types of inventory attributes has come up in past ECS discussions. One pitfall to avoid would be limiting them to certain field sets that wouldn't allow them to describe a broader range of assets someone might have in their inventory or CMDB.
Examples could be power supplies, generators, or server racks. These items would still have
model
,manufacturer
, orserial_number
attributes to capture but wouldn't necessarily still be considered hosts in the ECS sense of a host.In past brainstorming, the idea of creating an
inventory.*
orasset.*
field set has been suggested, but I think that idea would best be discussed as its own RFC.There was a problem hiding this comment.
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I am not sure I understand the distinction you're trying to make here. We have other lower level objects that are disimmilar (.name). Not sure why using a .model for host would preclude using a .model with a different description for another object would be problematic? The inventory. or asset. concept is still talking about an entity (a host), so it would be nice for context but it would also make my search problematic (E.G. if I needed to see a SW inventory on a host). In that case the fact that the scan came from tenable or my EDR host module would be the indicator that it was a point in time inventory vice an event with an associated host.
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I think what @ebeahan was trying to say was that in ECS, we describe host broadly as a 'general computing instance' meaning it can be anything from hardware to virtual machine to docker container, etc. The intention with a
inventory.*
orasset.*
would be specifically a physical item we want to keep track of.There was a problem hiding this comment.
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Understood. 1.12 has container fields, so I think that we can not worry about that issue. As far as a VM, host.model would be hard to populate, as it is not a current vmware field I am aware of. But, serial_number and vendor are capturable and exist.
I think it's fine to move toward a new object level. I think knowing the host is a Dell ModelX Serial#Y in context of the OS the host is running etc. is valuable and you might lose some of that context in the record, but otherwise;
If the inventory or asset tag is the way forward, let's choose a path.
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I personally prefer
asset
, but I think the RFC process could certainly guide us towards a name. Is this something you are interested in leading?There was a problem hiding this comment.
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As I revisited and am rethinking my suggestion, I'm starting to think adding these fields under
host.*
as proposed may be the better option.Like @hadadata59 mentioned, we already store asset details about a host, like architecture, OS details, geolocation data, underneath
host.*
fields already. We also explicitly listhardware
as a host type without specifying that a piece of hardware must be compute hardware.There was a problem hiding this comment.
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As mentioned in #1512 (comment), I like the symmetry of using
product
overmodel
to match the existingobserver.product
field naming.There was a problem hiding this comment.
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Thoughts about using
vendor
overmanufacturer
?vendor
provides symmetry withobserver.vendor
. Also, if someone had a specific use case to capture a host's ODM along with the vendor, I could see possible confusion over which one to place in themanufacturer
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we have been using vendor for software and manufacturer for hardware. However, I do not see a reason to object.