Introduction

JS7 - Log Management is offered with JOC Cockpit acting as a central point of view for monitoring of log output created by JS7 products 

The Log Notification Service is available from JOC Cockpit within the scope of JS7 - Services.

• Service
  • The service used to collect warnings and errors from log output of Controllers and Agents and to create JS7 - Notifications.
  • The service is compliant to RFC5424, aka Syslog Protocol.
  • The service offers restart capabilities: in case of fail-over or switch-over of JOC Cockpit the Log Notification Service will become available from the active JOC Cockpit instance.
• Clients
  • The JS7 Controller and Agents can act as clients to the Log Notification Service. The products can be configured to report warnings and errors from log output to the JS7 Log Notification Service, for details see JS7 - Log Configuration for use with System Notifications.
  • Users have a choice to enable forwarding of log output per instance of Controller and Agent during installation or later on by adjusting the Log4j2 configuration.
• User Interface
  • The JOC Cockpit offers notifications from the JS7 - Monitor view.
  • The JOC Cockpit offers JS7 - Notifications - Configuration for forwarding notifications by mail, from command line tools etc.

FEATURE AVAILABILITY STARTING FROM RELEASE 2.7.2

Configuration Items

The Log Notification Service is configured with the JS7 - Settings page.

Delimitation

Due to limitations of the underlying Syslog Protocol the JS7 Log Notification Service does not meet elaborated requirements for security, resiĺience and high availability.

The Log Notification Service is offered for convenience purposes, the authoritative source of log output remains with log files created by JS7 products.

Security

The Syslog Protocoll does not cover authentication of Clients:

• Log messages can be faked by malicious 3rd-party components as the JS7 Log Notification Service cannot authenticate and reliably identify the source of log output.
• Users are warned in case that they take action based on messages arriving with the JS7 Log Notification Service: severe messages that suggest immediate action should be verified from the JS7 product's log files.

The Syslog Protocol is exposed to denial-of-service attacks:

• Flooding of messages is a possible scenario for attacks which is not covered by the Syslog Protocol.
• The JS7 Log Notification Service will try to identify such scenarios and will limit processing of messages.

Resilience

The Log Notification Service accepts messages sent via the UDP protocol.

• TCP connections are out of scope due to their blocking nature.
• UDP messages are accepted if they do not exceed 4000 characters.

The Log Notification Service performs input sanitization.

• Messages sent to the Log Notification Service must be compliant to the above Log4j configuration and otherwise will be dropped.
• Messages carrying unacceptable input will be dropped.

High Availability

The JS7 Log Notification Service offers restart capabilities when operated from a JOC Cockpit cluster:

• This allows the service to switch from a current JOC Cockpit instance to the next active JOC Cockpit instance.
• Switching to a different host operating the active JOC Cockpit instance includes that the hostname of the Log Notification Service will change.
  • Users can apply a FailoverAppender with the JS7 - Log Configuration for use with System Notifications to switch between JOC Cockpit instances in case of unavailability.
  • Users can set up a Proxy Service that will forward log messages to the currently active JOC Cockpit instance.

If no JOC Cockpit instance is active, then no log messages can be picked up:

• In a situation when no JOC Cockpit instance is active UDP messages will be lost.
• Short periods of unavailability of JOC Cockpit can occur in case of fail-over and switch-over that take up to approx. 30s but can be prolonged if a larger number of orders is present.