Teleport

Export Teleport Audit Events with Datadog

Datadog is a SAAS monitoring and security platform. In this guide, we'll explain how to forward Teleport audit events to Datadog using Fluentd.

How it works

The Teleport Event Handler authenticates to the Teleport Auth Service to receive audit events over a gRPC stream, then sends those events to Fluentd as JSON payloads over a secure channel established via mutual TLS:

Since the Datadog Agent can only receive logs from remote sources as JSON-encoded bytes over a TCP or UDP connection, the Teleport Event Handler needs to send its HTTPS payloads without using the Datadog Agent. Fluentd handles authentication to the Datadog API.

Prerequisites

A running Teleport cluster version 17.0.0-dev or above. If you want to get started with Teleport, sign up for a free trial or set up a demo environment.
The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool.

Visit Installation for instructions on downloading tctl and tsh.

Recommended: Configure Machine ID to provide short-lived Teleport credentials to the plugin. Before following this guide, follow a Machine ID deployment guide to run the tbot binary on your infrastructure.

A Datadog account.
A server, virtual machine, Kubernetes cluster, or Docker environment to run the Event Handler. The instructions below assume a local Docker container for testing.
Fluentd version v1.12.4 or greater. The Teleport Event Handler will create a new fluent.conf file you can integrate into an existing Fluentd system, or use with a fresh setup.

The instructions below demonstrate a local test of the Event Handler plugin on your workstation. You will need to adjust paths, ports, and domains for other environments.

To check that you can connect to your Teleport cluster, sign in with tsh login, then verify that you can run tctl commands using your current credentials. For example:
```
tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=email@example.com
tctl status
Cluster  teleport.example.com
Version  17.0.0-dev
CA pin   sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678
```
If you can connect to the cluster and run the tctl status command, you can use your current credentials to run subsequent tctl commands from your workstation. If you host your own Teleport cluster, you can also run tctl commands on the computer that hosts the Teleport Auth Service for full permissions.

Step 1/6. Install the Event Handler plugin

The Teleport Event Handler runs alongside the Fluentd forwarder, receives events from Teleport's events API, and forwards them to Fluentd.

The Event Handler plugin is provided in amd64 and arm64 binaries for downloading. Replace ARCH with your required version.

curl -L -O https://cdn.teleport.dev/teleport-event-handler-v17.0.0-dev-linux-ARCH-bin.tar.gz
tar -zxvf teleport-event-handler-v17.0.0-dev-linux-ARCH-bin.tar.gz
sudo ./teleport-event-handler/install

The Event Handler plugin is provided in amd64 and arm64 binaries for downloading. Replace ARCH with your required version.

curl -L -O https://cdn.teleport.dev/teleport-event-handler-v17.0.0-dev-darwin-ARCH-bin.tar.gz
tar -zxvf teleport-event-handler-v17.0.0-dev-darwin-ARCH-bin.tar.gz
sudo ./teleport-event-handler/install

Ensure that you have Docker installed and running.

docker pull public.ecr.aws/gravitational/teleport-plugin-event-handler:17.0.0-dev

To allow Helm to install charts that are hosted in the Teleport Helm repository, use helm repo add:

helm repo add teleport https://charts.releases.teleport.dev

To update the cache of charts from the remote repository, run helm repo update:

helm repo update

You will need Go >= 1.22 installed.

Run the following commands on your Universal Forwarder host:

git clone https://github.com/gravitational/teleport.git --depth 1 -b branch/v17
cd teleport/integrations/event-handler
make build

The resulting executable will have the name event-handler. To follow the rest of this guide, rename this file to teleport-event-handler and move it to /usr/local/bin.

Step 2/6. Generate a plugin configuration

Run the configure command to generate a sample configuration. Replace mytenant.teleport.sh with the DNS name of your Teleport Enterprise Cloud tenant:

teleport-event-handler configure . mytenant.teleport.sh:443

Run the configure command to generate a sample configuration. Replace teleport.example.com:443 with the DNS name and HTTPS port of Teleport's Proxy Service:

teleport-event-handler configure . teleport.example.com:443

Run the configure command to generate a sample configuration. Assign TELEPORT_CLUSTER_ADDRESS to the DNS name and port of your Teleport Auth Service or Proxy Service:

TELEPORT_CLUSTER_ADDRESS=mytenant.teleport.sh:443
docker run -v `pwd`:/opt/teleport-plugin -w /opt/teleport-plugin public.ecr.aws/gravitational/teleport-plugin-event-handler:17.0.0-dev configure . ${TELEPORT_CLUSTER_ADDRESS?}

In order to export audit events, you'll need to have the root certificate and the client credentials available as a secret. Use the following command to create that secret in Kubernetes:

kubectl create secret generic teleport-event-handler-client-tls --from-file=ca.crt=ca.crt,client.crt=client.crt,client.key=client.key

This will pack the content of ca.crt, client.crt, and client.key into the secret so the Helm chart can mount them to their appropriate path.

Run the configure command to generate a sample configuration:

docker run -v `pwd`:/opt/teleport-plugin -w /opt/teleport-plugin public.ecr.aws/gravitational/teleport-plugin-event-handler:17.0.0-dev configure .

You'll see the following output:

Teleport event handler 17.0.0-dev

[1] mTLS Fluentd certificates generated and saved to ca.crt, ca.key, server.crt, server.key, client.crt, client.key
[2] Generated sample teleport-event-handler role and user file teleport-event-handler-role.yaml
[3] Generated sample fluentd configuration file fluent.conf
[4] Generated plugin configuration file teleport-event-handler.toml

The plugin generates several setup files:

ls -l
-rw------- 1 bob bob     1038 Jul  1 11:14 ca.crt
-rw------- 1 bob bob     1679 Jul  1 11:14 ca.key
-rw------- 1 bob bob     1042 Jul  1 11:14 client.crt
-rw------- 1 bob bob     1679 Jul  1 11:14 client.key
-rw------- 1 bob bob      541 Jul  1 11:14 fluent.conf
-rw------- 1 bob bob     1078 Jul  1 11:14 server.crt
-rw------- 1 bob bob     1766 Jul  1 11:14 server.key
-rw------- 1 bob bob      260 Jul  1 11:14 teleport-event-handler-role.yaml
-rw------- 1 bob bob      343 Jul  1 11:14 teleport-event-handler.toml

File(s)	Purpose
`ca.crt` and `ca.key`	Self-signed CA certificate and private key for Fluentd
`server.crt` and `server.key`	Fluentd server certificate and key
`client.crt` and `client.key`	Fluentd client certificate and key, all signed by the generated CA
`teleport-event-handler-role.yaml`	`user` and `role` resource definitions for Teleport's event handler
`fluent.conf`	Fluentd plugin configuration

This guide assumes that you are running the Event Handler on the same host or Kubernetes pod as your log forwarder. If you are not, you will need to instruct the Event Handler to generate mTLS certificates for subjects besides localhost. To do this, use the --cn and --dns-names flags of the teleport-event-handler configure command.

For example, if your log forwarder is addressable at forwarder.example.com and the Event Handler at handler.example.com, you would run the following configure command:

teleport-event-handler configure --cn=handler.example.com --dns-names=forwarder.example.com

The command generates client and server certificates with the subjects set to the value of --cn.

The --dns-names flag accepts a comma-separated list of DNS names. It will append subject alternative names (SANs) to the server certificate (the one you will provide to your log forwarder) for each DNS name in the list. The Event Handler looks up each DNS name before appending it as an SAN and exits with an error if the lookup fails.

Step 3/6. Create a user and role for reading audit events

The teleport-event-handler configure command generated a file called teleport-event-handler-role.yaml. This file defines a teleport-event-handler role and a user with read-only access to the event API:

kind: role
metadata:
  name: teleport-event-handler
spec:
  allow:
    rules:
      - resources: ['event', 'session']
        verbs: ['list','read']
version: v5
---
kind: user
metadata:
  name: teleport-event-handler
spec:
  roles: ['teleport-event-handler']
version: v2

Move this file to your workstation (or recreate it by pasting the snippet above) and use tctl on your workstation to create the role and the user:

tctl create -f teleport-event-handler-role.yaml
user "teleport-event-handler" has been created
role 'teleport-event-handler' has been created

Step 4/6. Create teleport-event-handler credentials

The Teleport Event Handler needs credentials to authenticate to the Teleport Auth Service. In this section, you will give the Event Handler access to these credentials.

Enable issuing of credentials for the Event Handler role

With the role created, you now need to allow the Machine ID bot to produce credentials for this role.

This can be done with tctl, replacing my-bot with the name of your bot:

tctl bots update my-bot --add-roles teleport-event-handler

In order for the Event Handler plugin to forward events from your Teleport cluster, it needs signed credentials from the cluster's certificate authority. The teleport-event-handler user cannot request this itself, and requires another user to impersonate this account in order to request credentials.

Create a role that enables your user to impersonate the teleport-event-handler user. First, paste the following YAML document into a file called teleport-event-handler-impersonator.yaml:

kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: teleport-event-handler-impersonator
spec:
  options:
    # max_session_ttl defines the TTL (time to live) of SSH certificates
    # issued to the users with this role.
    max_session_ttl: 10h

  # This section declares a list of resource/verb combinations that are
  # allowed for the users of this role. By default nothing is allowed.
  allow:
    impersonate:
      users: ["teleport-event-handler"]
      roles: ["teleport-event-handler"]

Next, create the role:

tctl create teleport-event-handler-impersonator.yaml

Add this role to the user that generates signed credentials for the Event Handler:

Assign the teleport-event-handler-impersonator role to your Teleport user by running the appropriate commands for your authentication provider:

Retrieve your local user's roles as a comma-separated list:

ROLES=$(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.roles | join(",")')

Edit your local user to add the new role:

tctl users update $(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.username') \  --set-roles "${ROLES?},teleport-event-handler-impersonator"

Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

Open your github authentication connector in a text editor:
```
tctl edit github/github
```
Edit the github connector, adding teleport-event-handler-impersonator to the teams_to_roles section.

The team you should map to this role depends on how you have designed your organization's role-based access controls (RBAC). However, the team must include your user account and should be the smallest team possible within your organization.

Here is an example:
```
  teams_to_roles:
    - organization: octocats
      team: admins
      roles:
        - access
+       - teleport-event-handler-impersonator
```
Apply your changes by saving closing the file in your editor.
Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

Retrieve your saml configuration resource:
```
tctl get --with-secrets saml/mysaml > saml.yaml
```
Note that the --with-secrets flag adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to the saml.yaml file. Because this key contains a sensitive value, you should remove the saml.yaml file immediately after updating the resource.
Edit saml.yaml, adding teleport-event-handler-impersonator to the attributes_to_roles section.

The attribute you should map to this role depends on how you have designed your organization's role-based access controls (RBAC). However, the group must include your user account and should be the smallest group possible within your organization.

Here is an example:
```
  attributes_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - teleport-event-handler-impersonator
```
Apply your changes:
```
tctl create -f saml.yaml
```
Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

Retrieve your oidc configuration resource:
```
tctl get oidc/myoidc --with-secrets > oidc.yaml
```
Note that the --with-secrets flag adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to the oidc.yaml file. Because this key contains a sensitive value, you should remove the oidc.yaml file immediately after updating the resource.
Edit oidc.yaml, adding teleport-event-handler-impersonator to the claims_to_roles section.

The claim you should map to this role depends on how you have designed your organization's role-based access controls (RBAC). However, the group must include your user account and should be the smallest group possible within your organization.

Here is an example:
```
  claims_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - teleport-event-handler-impersonator
```
Apply your changes:
```
tctl create -f oidc.yaml
```
Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

Export an identity file for the Event Handler plugin user

Give the plugin access to a Teleport identity file. We recommend using Machine ID for this in order to produce short-lived identity files that are less dangerous if exfiltrated, though in demo deployments, you can generate longer-lived identity files with tctl:

Configure tbot with an output that will produce the credentials needed by the plugin. As the plugin will be accessing the Teleport API, the correct output type to use is identity.

For this guide, the directory destination will be used. This will write these credentials to a specified directory on disk. Ensure that this directory can be written to by the Linux user that tbot runs as, and that it can be read by the Linux user that the plugin will run as.

Modify your tbot configuration to add an identity output.

If running tbot on a Linux server, use the directory output to write identity files to the /opt/machine-id directory:

outputs:
- type: identity
  destination:
    type: directory
    # For this guide, /opt/machine-id is used as the destination directory.
    # You may wish to customize this. Multiple outputs cannot share the same
    # destination.
    path: /opt/machine-id

If running tbot on Kubernetes, write the identity file to Kubernetes secret instead:

outputs:
  - type: identity
    destination:
      type: kubernetes_secret
      name: teleport-event-handler-identity

If operating tbot as a background service, restart it. If running tbot in one-shot mode, execute it now.

You should now see an identity file under /opt/machine-id or a Kubernetes secret named teleport-event-handler-identity. This contains the private key and signed certificates needed by the plugin to authenticate with the Teleport Auth Service.

Like all Teleport users, teleport-event-handler needs signed credentials in order to connect to your Teleport cluster. You will use the tctl auth sign command to request these credentials.

The following tctl auth sign command impersonates the teleport-event-handler user, generates signed credentials, and writes an identity file to the local directory:

tctl auth sign --user=teleport-event-handler --out=identity

The plugin connects to the Teleport Auth Service's gRPC endpoint over TLS.

The identity file, identity, includes both TLS and SSH credentials. The plugin uses the SSH credentials to connect to the Proxy Service, which establishes a reverse tunnel connection to the Auth Service. The plugin uses this reverse tunnel, along with your TLS credentials, to connect to the Auth Service's gRPC endpoint.

By default, tctl auth sign produces certificates with a relatively short lifetime. For production deployments, we suggest using Machine ID to programmatically issue and renew certificates for your plugin. See our Machine ID getting started guide to learn more.

Note that you cannot issue certificates that are valid longer than your existing credentials. For example, to issue certificates with a 1000-hour TTL, you must be logged in with a session that is valid for at least 1000 hours. This means your user must have a role allowing a max_session_ttl of at least 1000 hours (60000 minutes), and you must specify a --ttl when logging in:

tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --ttl=60060

If you are running the plugin on a Linux server, create a data directory to hold certificate files for the plugin:

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/teleport/api-credentials
sudo mv identity /var/lib/teleport/plugins/api-credentials

If you are running the plugin on Kubernetes, Create a Kubernetes secret that contains the Teleport identity file:

kubectl -n teleport create secret generic --from-file=identity teleport-event-handler-identity

Once the Teleport credentials expire, you will need to renew them by running the tctl auth sign command again.

Step 5/6. Install the Fluentd output plugin for Datadog

In order for Fluentd to communicate with Datadog, it requires the Fluentd output plugin for Datadog. Install the plugin on your Fluentd host using either gem or the td-agent, if installed:

Using Gem
gem install fluent-plugin-datadog

Using td-agent
/usr/sbin/td-agent-gem install fluent-plugin-datadog

Testing Locally?

If you're running Fluentd in a local Docker container for testing, you can adjust the entrypoint to an interactive shell as the root user, so you can install the plugin before starting Fluentd:

docker run -u $(id -u root):$(id -g root) -p 8888:8888 -v $(pwd):/keys -v \$(pwd)/fluent.conf:/fluentd/etc/fluent.conf --entrypoint=/bin/sh -i --tty  fluent/fluentd:edge
From the container shell:
gem install fluent-plugin-datadog
fluentd -c /fluentd/etc/fluent.conf

Configure Fluentd

Visit Datadog and generate an API key for Fluentd by following the Datadog documentation.

Copy the API key and use it to add a new <match> block to fluent.conf:

<match test.log>

  @type datadog
  @id awesome_agent
  api_key abcd123-insecure-do-not-use-this

  host http-intake.logs.us5.datadoghq.com

  # Optional parameters
  dd_source teleport

</match>

Edit your configuration as follows:
- Add your API key to the api_key field.
- Adjust the host value to match your Datadog site. See the Datadog Log Collection and Integrations guide to determine the correct value.
- dd_source is an optional field you can use to filter these logs in the Datadog UI.
- Adjust ca_path, cert_path and private_key_path to point to the credential files generated earlier. If you're testing locally, the Docker command above already mounted the current working directory to keys/ in the container.
Restart Fluentd after saving the changes to fluent.conf.

Step 6/6. Run the Teleport Event Handler plugin

In this section, you will modify the Event Handler configuration you generated and run the Event Handler to test your configuration.

Configure the Event Handler

In this section, you will configure the Teleport Event Handler for your environment.

Earlier, we generated a file called teleport-event-handler.toml to configure the Fluentd event handler. This file includes setting similar to the following:

storage = "./storage"
timeout = "10s"
batch = 20
namespace = "default"
# The window size configures the duration of the time window for the event handler
# to request events from Teleport. By default, this is set to 24 hours.
# Reduce the window size if the events backend cannot manage the event volume 
# for the default window size.
# The window size should be specified as a duration string, parsed by Go's time.ParseDuration.
window-size = "24h"

[forward.fluentd]
ca = "/home/bob/event-handler/ca.crt"
cert = "/home/bob/event-handler/client.crt"
key = "/home/bob/event-handler/client.key"
url = "https://fluentd.example.com:8888/test.log"
session-url = "https://fluentd.example.com:8888/session"

[teleport]
addr = "example.teleport.com:443"
identity = "identity"

Modify the configuration to replace fluentd.example.com with the domain name of your Fluentd deployment.

Use the following template to create teleport-plugin-event-handler-values.yaml:

eventHandler:
  storagePath: "./storage"
  timeout: "10s"
  batch: 20
  namespace: "default"
  # The window size configures the duration of the time window for the event handler
  # to request events from Teleport. By default, this is set to 24 hours.
  # Reduce the window size if the events backend cannot manage the event volume 
  # for the default window size.
  # The window size should be specified as a duration string, parsed by Go's time.ParseDuration.
  windowSize: "24h"

teleport:
  address: "example.teleport.com:443"
  identitySecretName: teleport-event-handler-identity
  identitySecretPath: identity

fluentd:
  url: "https://fluentd.fluentd.svc.cluster.local/events.log"
  sessionUrl: "https://fluentd.fluentd.svc.cluster.local/session.log"
  certificate:
    secretName: "teleport-event-handler-client-tls"
    caPath: "ca.crt"
    certPath: "client.crt"
    keyPath: "client.key"

persistentVolumeClaim:
  enabled: true

Next, modify the configuration file as follows:

addr: Include the hostname and HTTPS port of your Teleport Proxy Service or Teleport Enterprise Cloud account (e.g., teleport.example.com:443 or mytenant.teleport.sh:443).

identity: Fill this in with the path to the identity file you exported earlier.

client_key, client_crt, root_cas: Comment these out, since we are not using them in this configuration.

address: Include the hostname and HTTPS port of your Teleport Proxy Service or Teleport Enterprise Cloud tenant (e.g., teleport.example.com:443 or mytenant.teleport.sh:443).

identitySecretName: Fill in the identitySecretName field with the name of the Kubernetes secret you created earlier.

identitySecretPath: Fill in the identitySecretPath field with the path of the identity file within the Kubernetes secret. If you have followed the instructions above, this will be identity.

If you are providing credentials to the Event Handler using a tbot binary that runs on a Linux server, make sure the value of identity in the Event Handler configuration is the same as the path of the identity file you configured tbot to generate, /opt/machine-id/identity.

Start the Teleport Event Handler

Start the Teleport Teleport Event Handler by following the instructions below.

Copy the teleport-event-handler.toml file to /etc on your Linux server. Update the settings within the toml file to match your environment. Make sure to use absolute paths on settings such as identity and storage. Files and directories in use should only be accessible to the system user executing the teleport-event-handler service such as /var/lib/teleport-event-handler.

Next, create a systemd service definition at the path /usr/lib/systemd/system/teleport-event-handler.service with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=Teleport Event Handler
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/teleport-event-handler start --config=/etc/teleport-event-handler.toml --teleport-refresh-enabled=true
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
PIDFile=/run/teleport-event-handler.pid

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

If you are not using Machine ID to provide short-lived credentials to the Event Handler, you can remove the --teleport-refresh-enabled true flag.

Enable and start the plugin:

sudo systemctl enable teleport-event-handler
sudo systemctl start teleport-event-handler

You can configure when you would like the Teleport Event Handler to begin exporting events when you run the start command. This example will start exporting from May 5th, 2021:

teleport-event-handler start --config /etc/teleport-event-handler.toml --start-time "2021-05-05T00:00:00Z"

You can only determine the start time once, when first running the Teleport Event Handler. If you want to change the time frame later, remove the plugin state directory that you specified in the storage field of the handler's configuration file.

Once the Teleport Event Handler starts, you will see notifications about scanned and forwarded events:

sudo journalctl -u teleport-event-handler
DEBU   Event sent id:f19cf375-4da6-4338-bfdc-e38334c60fd1 index:0 ts:2022-09-2118:51:04.849 +0000 UTC type:cert.create event-handler/app.go:140...

Run the following command on your workstation:

helm install teleport-plugin-event-handler teleport/teleport-plugin-event-handler \  --values teleport-plugin-event-handler-values.yaml \  --version 17.0.0-dev

Navigate to the directory where you ran the configure command earlier and execute the following command:

docker run --network host -v `pwd`:/opt/teleport-plugin -w /opt/teleport-plugin public.ecr.aws/gravitational/teleport-plugin-event-handler:17.0.0-dev start --config=teleport-event-handler.toml

This command joins the Event Handler container to the preset host network, which uses the Docker host networking mode and removes network isolation, so the Event Handler can communicate with the Fluentd container on localhost.

The Logs view in Datadog should now report your Teleport cluster events:

Troubleshooting connection issues

If the Teleport Event Handler is displaying error logs while connecting to your Teleport Cluster, ensure that:

The certificate the Teleport Event Handler is using to connect to your Teleport cluster is not past its expiration date. This is the value of the --ttl flag in the tctl auth sign command, which is 12 hours by default.
Ensure that in your Teleport Event Handler configuration file (teleport-event-handler.toml), you have provided the correct host and port for the Teleport Proxy Service.

Next steps

Read more about impersonation here.
While this guide uses the tctl auth sign command to issue credentials for the Teleport Event Handler, production clusters should use Machine ID for safer, more reliable renewals. Read our guide to getting started with Machine ID.
To see all of the options you can set in the values file for the teleport-plugin-event-handler Helm chart, consult our reference guide.
Review the Fluentd output plugin for Datadog README file to learn how to customize the log format entering Datadog.

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Export Teleport Audit Events with Datadog

How it works

Prerequisites

Step 1/6. Install the Event Handler plugin

Step 2/6. Generate a plugin configuration

Step 3/6. Create a user and role for reading audit events

Step 4/6. Create teleport-event-handler credentials

Enable issuing of credentials for the Event Handler role

Export an identity file for the Event Handler plugin user

Step 5/6. Install the Fluentd output plugin for Datadog

Configure Fluentd

Step 6/6. Run the Teleport Event Handler plugin

Configure the Event Handler

Start the Teleport Event Handler

Troubleshooting connection issues

Next steps