How to ease your System Administration email workload with Splunk

Systems generate a lot of email. If you’re a sysadmin, you already know this. If you work with sysadmins, then you’re to blame (ok, maybe not). In either case, dealing with system email is time consuming, and the signal-to-noise ratio is low. More often than not these emails are ignored (procmail FTW!).
Is this a good thing? No.
Why?
These emails are generated for a reason, and that reason is usually that there’s something amiss on your system. Instead of /dev/null’ing all of these useful nuggets, why not mine them with Splunk?

In this How To we’ll setup a catch-all Postfix server and use it to Splunk all of your system generated email.

Overview

• Install and start Splunk.
• Install and start Postifx.
• Configure Postfix catch-all.
• Configre your system(s) to use the Postfix catch-all.
• Configure Splunk to consume the catch-all email.

Note: Splunk need not be installed on the same system as Postfix, but for the purposes of this How To, they are co-existent.

Steps

1. Download Splunk Here.
2. Postfix can be installed on Ubuntu using apt, or in FreeBSD using ports:
   • Ubuntu: $ sudo apt-get install postfix -f
   • FreeBSD: $ cd /usr/ports/mail/postfix; sudo make install
3. In Postfix’s main.cfg file:
   • Set virtual_alias_domains to all hosts from which you’re going to accept mail: virtual_alias_domains = sfeserv01.splunk.com,sfeserv31.splunk.com
   • Set virtual_alias_maps to your virtual alias map file: virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual
4. In Postfix’s virtual_alias_map file create a catch-all alias for each host from which you’re going to accept mail:
@sfeserv01.splunk.com catch-all
@sfeserv31.splunk.com catch-all

5. In Postfix’s aliases file create a catch-all alias and redirect it to a Maildir: catch-all: /var/mail/catch-all/
6. Refresh aliases, rehash maps, and reload Postfix configs:
$ sudo newaliases
$ sudo postmap /etc/postfix/virtual
$ sudo postfix reload

7. In Splunk’s inputs.conf file configure batch monitor of the catch-all Maildir:
# $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/system/local/inputs.conf
[batch:///var/mail/catch-all]
interval = 300
disabled = false
index = admin_mail
source = admin_mail
move_policy = sinkhole
sourcetype = admin_mail

8. In Splunk’s props.conf file configure email event parsing:
# $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/system/local/props.conf
[admin_mail]
TRUNCATE = 0
MAX_EVENTS=200000
TIME_PREFIX = Date:\s
LINE_BREAKER = tacotacotacotaco
BREAK_ONLY_BEFORE = tacotacotacotaco

9. In Splunk’s indexes.conf file configure the email index:
# $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/system/local/indexes.conf
[admin_mail]
homePath = $SPLUNK_DB/admin_mail/db
coldPath = $SPLUNK_DB/admin_mail/colddb
thawedPath = $SPLUNK_DB/admin_mail/thaweddb

10. Restart Splunk: $ splunk restart
11. Now configure your system(s) to use the Postfix catch-all mail server. In Postfix this can be accomplished in main.cfg:
    relayhost = mail-relay.splunk.com

Search

You can now search Splunk for system emails: index="admin_mail" ERROR
Which should return results like these:

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Thanks!
Greg Albrecht