Elasticsearch Best Practices - Installation Guide - 6.9 - Cortex XSOAR - Cortex - Security Operations

Cortex XSOAR Installation Guide

Product
Cortex XSOAR
Version
6.9
Creation date
2022-09-01
Last date published
2024-10-21
End_of_Life
EoL
Category
Installation Guide
Abstract

Outline of how Elasticsearch should be configured to work with Cortex XSOAR for high availability.

The following are the recommended best practices to install Cortex XSOAR with Elasticsearch.

  • It is important to utilize Elasticsearch versatile behavior using shards and replicas. If you are using more than 1 node, we recommend that you set the elasticsearch.defaultShardsPerIndex and elasticsearch.defaultReplicasPerIndex to 1 and 2, respectively. You can also use elasticsearch.shards and elasticsearch.replicas to configure specific number of shards and replicas respectively on each index.

    For example, setting the following values in demisto.conf sets 2 replicas for each shard for the incidents index:

    "elasticsearch": { "shards": { "common-incident": 1 }, "replicas": { "common-incident": 2 } } }

    Note

    This configuration takes effect when the index is created.

  • Suggested configuration based on the number of data nodes in the Elasticsearch cluster:

    Configuration

    2 Data Nodes

    3 Data Nodes

    4 Data Nodes

    defaultShardsPerIndex

    1

    1

    1

    defaultReplicasPerIndex

    1

    2

    3

    Shards:

    - common entry

    - common-invplaybook

    2

    3

    4

    Replicas:

    - common entry

    - common-invplaybook

    1

    1

    1

  • Cortex XSOAR uses internal batch to Elasticsearch to avoid heavy requests and large indexing latency. You can increase the batch size using elasticsearch.innerBatchSize to increase performance and speed, or decrease the value if Elasticsearch is not optimized.

  • Due to Cortex XSOAR’s high usage of Elasticsearch, we recommend having the lowest latency possible between the Cortex XSOAR server and the Elasticsearch nodes configured. We also recommend having low latency between nodes to avoid slow indexing or possible data loss on outages. Any latency between Cortex XSOAR and Elasticsearch will greatly impact performance.

  • Elasticsearch uses an inner memory management implemented in JAVA that is called the heap size. It defaults to 1GB and Cortex XSOAR recommends you increase the heap size to 50% of machine's memory, or more if the machine is dedicated to Elasticsearch.

  • Elasticsearch uses a refreshing mechanism to flush updated documents to the disk every configured seconds. We recommend setting the configuration index to 1 second. You can use the Cortex XSOAR demisto.conf file to set a specific refreshing interval in seconds for each index using elasticsearch.refreshIntervals.

    For example, the following sets the configuration index to 1 second:

    "elasticsearch": { "refreshIntervals": { "common-configuration": 1s } }

    Note

    This configuration takes effect when the index is created.

  • We recommend using the most recent supported version of Elasticsearch, to ensure you have the latest features and all security updates.

  • Circuit breakers in Elasticsearch are enabled by default. Verify they are enabled and configured correctly, specifically the request circuit breaker and the parent circuit breaker. These circuit breakers will prevent data nodes from crashing on high memory consumption and will also drop certain requests that Cortex XSOAR will retry later.

  • Elasticsearch requires a large number of open file descriptors. Verify that the limit on the number of open file descriptors is sufficient to handle a high load of requests, to avoid possible data loss or service interruptions.

Scaling

To optimize an Elasticsearch deployment for scaling, we recommend using dedicated a master node as well as coordinating nodes to handle requests, thus having all connections and requests go through the coordinating nodes. Using dedicated coordinating nodes improves Elasticsearch balancing when some data nodes might be unavailable or unresponsive due to high load. Dedicated master node(s) ease data nodes responsibility around shard management, snapshots and monitoring. Elasticsearch distributes the requests more efficiently through the use of master and coordinating nodes.

We also recommend using a load balancer or round-robin DNS server when configuring an elasticsearch.url that points to all/any coordinating nodes. A load balancer enables you to swap, add or remove data nodes, master nodes and coordinating nodes without having to update the Cortex XSOAR configuration file and restart the Cortex XSOAR service, thus significantly decreasing down time for any changes.

Mapping

Indexes with custom fields such as incidents, evidence, and indicators might exceed the max fields mapping limit in Elasticsearch. By default, Cortex XSOAR sets the limit to 2000. If you require more, you can increase the elasticsearch.totalFields field in the demisto.conf file.

For example, the following sets the incidents index maximum to 3000 mapped fields:

"elasticsearch": { "totalFields": { "common-incident": 3000 } }

Note

This configuration takes effect when the index is created.