Cost Optimized flow logs

0

My firm is deploying Palo Alto Prisma Cloud to protect my main AWS account. The Prisma Cloud platform is dependent on ingestion and analysis of VPC Flow Logs. There are two methods for integrating with their platform; either send the flow logs to S3 bucket or CloudWatch Logs. Our analysis of the implementation found that sending the flow logs out is cost-prohibitive for us. The logs would be sent outside (ingested by the Palo Alto Prisma Cloud platform). This is all in the main AWS account where we have 1 VPC with a few subnets. It’s a highly transactional environment where they seem to produce over 700GB in flow logs (1 flow log) which will cost about $7500 per month to produce, send to a s3 bucket, and then pulled by Prisma Cloud. We’re trying to cost optimize and are concerned about the data transfer from S3 or Cloudwatch, and then from either of those to Prisma Cloud. Prisma Cloud parses the log and then transfers the data to a database is used by our platform. We asked Palo Alto if we could simply send the REJECT traffic rather than ALL as a means to reduce the log size. Palo Alto’s recommendation/response was that due to the ML capability on the platform, if they don’t receive the ACCEPT traffic they can’t establish a baseline of normal. And so, it would be unable to determine abnormal or anomalous traffic.

asked 4 months ago391 views
1 Answer
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Accepted Answer

Hello,

The $7500 figure sounds high. What is the scope of your flow log configuration? What I mean is it configured for the entire VPC, which is what it sounds like? I suggest enabling flows at smallest level or scope that will enable you to see the traffic that is of interest.

Scope the flow logs to the specific ENIs required for the analysis rather than the entire VPC, that may be at the subnet or ENI level for your purpose.

It would help if you provided more detail on the flow log config.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/flow-logs.html

AWS
Rudy
answered 4 months ago
profile pictureAWS
EXPERT
reviewed 4 months ago

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