Monitoring for network traffic volume outliers

Data required 

Firewall data

How to use Splunk software for this use case

You can run many searches with Splunk software to establish baselines and set alerts. Depending on what information you have available, you might find it useful to identify some or all of the following: 

• Number of connections between source-destination pairs
• Volume of traffic between source-destination pairs
• Total bytes out from source IP addresses
• Percentage of total bytes out from a source to a single destination

As you establish baselines, you might find source IP addresses that you want to investigate immediately. You can run the following investigations based off results from the monitoring activities in this use case:

• Volume of network traffic from one user
• Network traffic patterns between a source-destination pair

Next steps

To maximize their benefit, the how-to articles linked in the previous section likely need to tie into existing processes at your organization or become new standard processes. These processes commonly impact success with this use case: 

• Understanding cyclical usage patterns
• Understanding network management policies 
• Creating inventories of physical and virtual network devices
• Creating network diagrams
• Adhering to frameworks, such as the IT Infrastructure Library 

Measuring impact and benefit is critical to assessing the value of security operations. The following are example metrics that can be useful to monitor when implementing this use case:

• Identification of risk factors: The number of anomalies you identified that were positive security risks

These additional Splunk resources might help you with this use case:

• Splunk Docs: Stats command
• Splunk Docs: Statistical and charting functions