Native Integrations

F5 log monitoring and analysis with Log360

Overview

Log360 supports the ingestion and analysis of syslog data from F5 BIG-IP appliances, enabling organizations to monitor application delivery performance, detect security anomalies, and audit administrative activity. The integration leverages F5’s native syslog forwarding capabilities to centralize and correlate log data within the Log360 platform.

Log collection architecture

F5 devices are configured to forward syslog messages to the Log360 server over UDP or TCP. These logs are received by Log360's built-in syslog listener and parsed using log parsing rules. This ensures structured ingestion of events across network, system, and security domains.

Types of logs collected from F5

Local Traffic Manager (LTM) logs: Captures VIP connections, load balancing decisions, and pool member states.
Access Policy Manager (APM) logs: Provides insight into user sessions, SSO events, and authentication outcomes.
Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) logs: Includes DoS detection, firewall policy actions, IDS and IPS logs, and firewall traffic.
System logs: Covers configuration saves, service restarts, hardware status, and license events.
Application security logs: Records user logins, configuration modifications, CLI and API access, interface events, and command execution history.

Monitoring and analysis capabilities

Log360 performs structured parsing, indexing, and enrichment of F5 syslogs to support:

Security analytics:

Detect anomalous access attempts and malformed traffic.
Identify brute-force login attempts or bypasses in APM.
Correlate AFM firewall alerts with known threat indicators.

Operational monitoring:

Track the health and state of virtual servers, pools, and nodes.
Alert on pool member flaps, SSL offload issues, or load distribution imbalance.
Monitor resource utilization and failover events in high availability deployments.

Configuration and compliance auditing:

Audit administrative sessions (i.e., GUI, CLI, or iControl REST).
Maintain trails of critical changes, such as rule updates or profile modifications.
Generate compliance-aligned reports for the PCI DSS, HIPAA, and the NIST.

Key benefits

Centralized visibility: Ingest and analyze F5 logs alongside logs from firewalls, endpoints, and cloud platforms.
Improved incident response: Use contextual alerts and forensic drilldowns for faster triage and remediation.
Regulatory adherence: Leverage built-in reporting templates tailored for F5-specific security and audit use cases.

Address key F5 security challenges

Challenge	Solution offered by Log360
Lack of centralized visibility into F5 traffic and access logs	Aggregates LTM, APM, and AFM logs into a unified SIEM dashboard with correlation capabilities.
Difficulty auditing administrative and configuration changes	Tracks CLI-, API-, and GUI-based changes and user actions, and provides audit-ready logs.
Inability to detect attacks passing through load balancers or firewalls	Correlates F5 firewall and access logs with threat feeds and UEBA insights for accurate detection.
Delayed response to application delivery or availability issues	Real-time alerts on pool and node health changes, SSL handshake errors, and load distribution anomalies.
Compliance gaps due to limited reporting from F5 appliances	Offers prebuilt templates aligned with the PCI DSS, HIPAA, and other frameworks using F5 log data.