Proxy Log Storage Professional Edition — Complete Deployment Guide

Proxy Log Storage Professional Edition — Complete Deployment Guide

Overview

Proxy Log Storage Professional Edition is a scalable, enterprise-grade solution for collecting, storing, indexing, and querying proxy logs from multiple edge devices and reverse proxies. It centralizes logs for compliance, forensics, performance monitoring, and threat-hunting while offering retention controls, role-based access, and integrations with SIEMs and analytics platforms.

Pre-deployment checklist

• System requirements: 16+ CPU cores, 64+ GB RAM, 1–10 TB SSD (depending on retention), 10 Gbps networking recommended for large ingest.
• Supported inputs: Common proxy vendors (Squid, HAProxy, Nginx, Envoy), syslog, JSON over TCP/HTTP, S3 archival.
• Authentication: LDAP/AD, SAML SSO, local users.
• Storage options: Local SSD, network block storage, or object storage (S3/compatible) for long-term archival.
• Backup strategy: Regular snapshots of metadata + periodic object-store backups of raw logs.
• Compliance needs: Configure retention, encryption-at-rest, and audit logging per policy.

Architecture

• Ingest tier: Lightweight forwarders on edge nodes or central collectors that normalize log formats and buffer during network issues.
• Indexing tier: Distributed indexers that create searchable indices; scale horizontally for higher query throughput.
• Storage tier: Hot storage for recent logs on fast disks; cold/object storage for older data with lifecycle policies.
• Query/API tier: Query nodes that accept user queries, enforce RBAC, and federate across indexers and archives.
• Management & UI: Single-pane console for configuration, dashboards, alerting, and role-based views.
• Integrations: SIEMs (Splunk, QRadar), analytics (Grafana), alerting (PagerDuty), and ticketing (Jira).

Deployment steps (recommended)

1. Plan capacity
   • Estimate daily ingest (GB/day) × retention days = storage. Add 20–30% headroom.
2. Provision infrastructure
   • Deploy VMs/hosts for forwarders, indexers, query nodes, and management.
3. Install components
   • Install forwarders on proxy hosts or set up centralized collection. Deploy indexers and storage connectors.
4. Configure ingestion
   • Enable native connectors for proxy logs; set parsing rules for fields (timestamp, src/dst IP, user, URL, response code, bytes).
5. Set retention & lifecycle
   • Configure hot/cold tiers and automated archival to S3 after X days.
6. Secure the deployment
   • Enable TLS for all transport, enable encryption-at-rest, integrate SSO, and set least-privilege RBAC.
7. Set up monitoring & alerting
   • Monitor ingest rates, indexer health, storage utilization, and query latencies. Configure alerts for thresholds.
8. Migrate historical logs
   • Bulk-load past logs into cold storage with proper metadata mapping.
9. Test queries & dashboards
   • Validate parsing, run sample forensic and performance queries, build dashboards for common workflows.
10. Go-live checklist

• Validate backup, failover, access controls, and run a simulated outage/recovery drill.

Parsing & normalization best practices

• Use a canonical schema for fields (timestamp in UTC, client_ip, server_ip, method, url, status, bytes, user_agent).
• Normalize timezones to UTC at ingest.
• Extract and index high-cardinality fields selectively (e.g., useragent can be high-cardinality; store parsed tokens instead).
• Use enrichment: GeoIP, ASN lookups, CIDR grouping, threat intelligence tagging.