| It is critical for the appropriate personnel to be aware if a system is at risk of failing to process traffic logs as required. Without this notification, the security personnel may be unaware of an impending failure of the audit capability and system operation may be adversely affected.
Audit processing failures include software/hardware errors, failures in the audit capturing mechanisms, and audit storage capacity being reached or exceeded. Most firewalls use User Datagram Protocol (UDP) to send audit records to the server and cannot tell if the server has received the transmission. Thus, when the event daemon stops working, messages and notifications cannot be sent to the event monitor (e.g., Network Management System [NMS], Security Information and Event Management [SIEM], Syslog) or to the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) server. Another method such as a keep-alive with the central audit server may be required.
This requirement applies to each audit data storage repository (i.e., distinct information system component where traffic log records are stored), the centralized audit storage capacity of organizations (i.e., all audit data storage repositories combined), or both.
Note that CCI-001858 requires that audit failure alerts be in real time; thus, simply sending a log event to the central audit server is not sufficient. |
