Cortex XSIAM Destination

The Cortex XSIAM Destination allows you to seamlessly stream event data to Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XSIAM (Extended Security Intelligence and Automation Management) for advanced threat detection and response.

Type: Streaming | TLS Support: Yes | PQ Support: Yes

XSIAM Data Requirements

Cribl Stream provides a generic Palo Alto XSIAM Pack designed to extract and map mandatory fields. Cribl Stream automatically validates and converts these fields into HTTP headers, ensuring compliance with XSIAM requirements. For details on using the Pack, see how to map data to the XSIAM Destination.

Optimized Data Delivery:

• Automatic Format Parsing: Detects event formats, including CEF, LEEF, Syslog, JSON, and Raw.
• Batched Transmission: To optimize data ingestion and reduce overhead, events are grouped into batches. Set the Flush period to control latency. Allowed values are 1 second or greater.
• Aggregation: Uses batched keys derived from the event format and system fields.
• Payload Size: Enforces a 5 MB limit per individual event and a 10 MB limit per batch. Warnings are logged if data exceeds these limits.
• Rate Limiting: There’s a default request rate limit of 400 requests per second. Customizable with the Throttle request rate limit setting to align with your XSIAM capacity.
• JSON formatting: Events are serialized into JSON format for XSIAM ingestion.
  • The Content-Type: application/json header is included in all requests.
  • The data field is represented as a native JSON object, ensuring direct parsing of its contents. This native JSON structure allows XSIAM to efficiently query and analyze the data within the field, for example:

  {"data": {"resource": "/done", "path": "/done", "isBase64Encoded": false}, "collector_ms": 1742743457851}

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Prerequisite

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In XSIAM, create a data collector instance and obtain an authorization token and endpoint URL. See the appropriate Cortex XSIAM documentation below for instructions.

• Cortex XSIAM 2.x
• Cortex XSIAM Premium
• Cortex XSIAM Enterprise
• Cortex XSIAM NG SIEM

Configure an XSIAM Destination

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1. On the top bar, select Products, and then select Cribl Stream. Under Worker Groups, select a Worker Group. Next, you have two options:
   • To configure via QuickConnect, navigate to Routing > QuickConnect (Stream) or Collect (Edge). Select Add Destination and select the Destination you want from the list, choosing either Select Existing or Add New.
   • To configure via the Routes, select Data > Destinations or More > Destinations (Edge). Select the Destination you want. Next, select Add Destination.
2. In the New Destination modal, configure the following under General Settings:
   • Output ID: Enter a unique name to identify this definition. If you clone this Destination, Cribl Stream will add -CLONE to the original Output ID.
   • Description: Optionally, enter a description.
   • XSIAM endpoint: XSIAM endpoint URL to send events to, following this format https://api-{tenant external URL}/logs/v1/event. Defaults to http://localhost:8088/logs/v1/event.
3. Under Authentication, select an Authentication method from the dropdown:
   • Bearer Token: Displays an Auth token field for you to enter your XSIAM authorization token.
   • Secret: Displays an Auth token (text secret) drop-down to select a stored secret. A Create link is available to store a new, reusable secret.
4. Next, you can configure the following Optional Settings:
   • Backpressure behavior: Select whether to block, drop, or queue events when all receivers are exerting backpressure. (Causes might include a broken or denied connection, or a rate limiter.) Defaults to Block.
   • Tags: Optionally, add tags that you can use to filter and group Destinations on the Destinations page. These tags aren’t added to processed events. Use a tab or hard return between (arbitrary) tag names.
5. If you assigned the Backpressure behavior to Persistent Queue you can adjust the Persistent Queue settings.
6. Optionally, you can adjust the Retries, and Advanced settings outlined in the sections below.
7. Select Save.
8. Map data to the XSIAM Destination.
9. Commit & Deploy your changes.

Map data to the XSIAM Destination

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In Cribl Stream, add the Palo Alto XSIAM Pack to your Worker Group. Navigate to Processing > Packs from the Worker Group submenu, and add the Pack. Once added, you’ll be able to assign the Pack to your Route or QuickConnect that maps data from Sources to the XSIAM Destination.

• The Pack includes several Pipelines designed for specific data types.

  Configure the Pack Route to use the appropriate Pipeline for your data type.

• If you’re sending different data types for your XSIAM Destination, create a separate Pack with the appropriate Pipeline for each data type.

Persistent Queue Settings

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The Persistent Queue Settings tab displays when the Backpressure behavior option in General settings is set to Persistent Queue. Persistent queue buffers and preserves incoming events when a downstream Destination has an outage or experiences backpressure.

Before enabling persistent queue, learn more about persistent queue behavior and how to optimize it with your system:

• About Persistent Queues
• Optimize Destination Persistent Queues (dPQ)
• Destination Backpressure Triggers

On Cribl-managed Cloud Workers (with an Enterprise plan), this tab exposes only the destructive Clear Persistent Queue button (described at the end of this section). A maximum queue size of 1 GB disk space is automatically allocated per PQ‑enabled Destination, per Worker Process. The 1 GB limit is on outbound uncompressed data, and no compression is applied to the queue.

This limit is not configurable. If the queue fills up, Cribl Stream/Edge will block outbound data. To configure the queue size, compression, queue-full fallback behavior, and other options below, use a hybrid Group.

Mode: Use this menu to select when Cribl Stream/Edge engages the persistent queue in response to backpressure events from this Destination. The options are:

If a Worker/Edge Node starts with an invalid Mode setting, it automatically switches to Error mode. This might happen if the Worker/Edge Node is running a version that does not support other modes (older than 4.9.0), or if it encounters a nonexistent value in YAML configuration files.

File size limit: The maximum data volume to store in each queue file before closing it. Enter a numeral with units of KB, MB, etc. Defaults to 1 MB.

Queue size limit: The maximum amount of disk space that the queue can consume on each Worker Process. When the queue reaches this limit, the Destination stops queueing data and applies the Queue‑full behavior. Defaults to 5 GB. This field accepts positive numbers with units of KB, MB, GB, and so on. You can set it as high as 1 TB, unless you’ve configured a different Worker Process PQ size limit on the @{group} Settings page.

Queue file path: The location for the persistent queue files. Defaults to $CRIBL_HOME/state/queues. Cribl Stream/Edge will append /<worker‑id>/<output‑id> to this value.

Compression: Set the codec to use when compressing the persisted data after closing a file. Defaults to None. Gzip is also available.

Queue-full behavior: Whether to block or drop events when the queue begins to exert backpressure. A queue begins to exert backpressure when the disk is low or at full capacity. This setting has two options:

• Block: The output will refuse to accept new data until the receiver is ready. The system will return block signals back to the sender.
• Drop new data: Discard all new events until the backpressure event has resolved and the receiver is ready.

Backpressure duration Limit: When Mode is set to Backpressure, this setting controls how long to wait during network slowdowns before activating queues. A shorter duration enhances critical data loss prevention, while a longer duration helps avoid unnecessary queue transitions in environments with frequent, brief network fluctuations. The default value is 30 seconds.

Strict ordering: Toggle on (default) to enable FIFO (first in, first out) event forwarding, ensuring Cribl Stream/Edge sends earlier queued events first when receivers recover. The persistent queue flushes every 10 seconds in this mode. Toggle off to prioritize new events over queued events, configure a custom drain rate for the queue, and display this option:

• Drain rate limit (EPS): Optionally, set a throttling rate (in events per second) on writing from the queue to receivers. (The default 0 value disables throttling.) Throttling the queue drain rate can boost the throughput of new and active connections by reserving more resources for them. You can further optimize Worker startup connections and CPU load in the Worker Processes settings.

Clear Persistent Queue: For Cloud Enterprise only, click this button if you want to delete the files that are currently queued for delivery to this Destination. If you click this button, a confirmation modal appears. Clearing the queue frees up disk space by permanently deleting the queued data, without delivering it to downstream receivers. This button only appears after you define the Output ID.

Use the Clear Persistent Queue button with caution to avoid data loss. See Steps to Safely Disable and Clear Persistent Queues for more information.

Processing Settings

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Post‑Processing

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Pipeline: Pipeline or Pack to process data before sending the data out using this output.

System fields: A list of fields to automatically add to events that use this output. By default, includes cribl_pipe (identifying the Cribl Stream Pipeline that processed the event). Supports wildcards. Other options include:

• cribl_host – Cribl Stream Node that processed the event.
• cribl_input – Cribl Stream Source that processed the event.
• cribl_output – Cribl Stream Destination that processed the event.
• cribl_route – Cribl Stream Route (or QuickConnect) that processed the event.
• cribl_wp – Cribl Stream Worker Process that processed the event.

Retries

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Honor Retry-After header: Toggle on to honor a Retry-After header, provided that the header specifies a delay no longer than 180 seconds. Cribl Stream/Edge limits the delay to 180 seconds even if the Retry-After header specifies a longer delay. Any Retry-After header received takes precedence over all other options configured in the Retries section. Toggle off to ignore all Retry-After headers.

Settings for failed HTTP requests: When you want to automatically retry requests that receive particular HTTP response status codes, use these settings to list those response codes.

For any HTTP response status codes that are not explicitly configured for retries, Cribl Stream/Edge applies the following rules:

Upon receiving a response code that’s on the list, Cribl Stream/Edge first waits for a set time interval called the Pre-backoff interval and then begins retrying the request. Time between retries increases based on an exponential backoff algorithm whose base is the Backoff multiplier, until the backoff multiplier reaches the Backoff limit (ms). At that point, Cribl Stream/Edge continues retrying the request without increasing the time between retries any further.

If the sender (which manages the connection to the Destination) is at capacity, it will not accept any incoming events. These incoming events originate internally from a previous stage of the data flow when Destinations send outbound requests to their respective external services, and they include retry requests and new requests. Any events that were already in transit when the sender reached capacity will continue to be processed downstream.

Sender capacity is freed up when an outgoing request succeeds or encounters a non-retryable error. When the sender has available capacity again, it will resume accepting incoming events. This capacity management is influenced by the number of active connections and configured limits, such as concurrency and buffer sizes. If a Pipeline sends events faster than the Destination can process, the buffers may fill up, leading to backpressure and Sender at capacity warnings. This backpressure prevents the sender from accepting additional requests until capacity is restored.

By default, this Destination has no response codes configured for automatic retries. For each response code you want to add to the list, select Add Setting and configure the following settings:

• HTTP status code: A response code that indicates a failed request, for example 429 (Too Many Requests) or 503 (Service Unavailable).
• Pre-backoff interval (ms): The amount of time to wait before beginning retries, in milliseconds. Defaults to 1000 (one second).
• Backoff multiplier: The base for the exponential backoff algorithm. A value of 2 (the default) means that Cribl Stream/Edge will retry after 2 seconds, then 4 seconds, then 8 seconds, and so on.
• Backoff limit (ms): The maximum backoff interval Cribl Stream/Edge should apply for its final retry, in milliseconds. Default (and minimum) is 10,000 (10 seconds); maximum is 180,000 (180 seconds, or 3 minutes).

Retry timed-out HTTP requests: Toggle on to automatically retry requests that have timed out and display the following settings for configuring retry behavior:

• Pre-backoff interval (ms): The amount of time to wait before beginning retries, in milliseconds. Defaults to 1000 (one second).
• Backoff multiplier: The base for the exponential backoff algorithm. A value of 2 (the default) means that Cribl Stream/Edge will retry after 2 seconds, then 4 seconds, then 8 seconds, and so on.
• Backoff limit (ms): The maximum backoff interval Cribl Stream/Edge should apply for its final retry, in milliseconds. Default (and minimum) is 10,000 (10 seconds); maximum is 180,000 (180 seconds, or 3 minutes).

Advanced Settings

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Validate server certs: Reject certificates that are not authorized by a trusted CA (for example, the system’s CA). Defaults to toggled on.

Round–robin DNS: Toggle on to enable round-robin DNS lookup across multiple IP addresses, IPv4 and IPv6. When a DNS server resolves a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) to multiple IP addresses, Cribl Stream will sequentially use each address in the order they are returned by the DNS server for subsequent connection attempts.

Request timeout: Amount of time (in seconds) to wait for a request to complete before aborting it. Defaults to 30.

Request concurrency: Maximum number of concurrent requests per Worker Process. When Cribl Stream hits this limit, it begins throttling traffic to the downstream service. Defaults to 5. Minimum: 1. Maximum: 32.

Events-per-request limit: Maximum number of events to include in the request body. The 0 default allows unlimited events.

Flush period (sec): Maximum time between requests. Low values can cause the payload size to be smaller than the configured Body size limit. Defaults to 1.

• Retries happen on this flush interval.
• Any HTTP response code in the 2xx range is considered success.
• Any response code in the 5xx range is considered a retryable error, which will not trigger Persistent Queue (PQ) usage.
• Any other response code will trigger PQ (if PQ is configured as the Backpressure behavior).

Throttle request rate limit: Maximum number of HTTP requests sent per second. Defaults to 400, maximum 2000. Requests exceeding this limit are stored in the persistent queue until capacity becomes available.

Extra HTTP headers: Click Add Header to add Name/Value pairs to pass as additional HTTP headers. Values will be sent encrypted.

Environment: If you’re using GitOps, optionally use this field to specify a single Git branch on which to enable this configuration. If empty, the config will be enabled everywhere.

Notes on HTTP-Based Outputs

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• To proxy outbound HTTP/S requests, see System Proxy Configuration.

• Cribl Stream will attempt to use keepalives to reuse a connection for multiple requests. After two minutes of the first use, the connection will be thrown away, and a new connection will be reattempted. This is to prevent sticking to a particular Destination when there is a constant flow of events.

• If the server does not support keepalives – or if the server closes a pooled connection while idle – a new connection will be established for the next request.

Troubleshooting

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This table outlines common API call errors, showing response codes and log messages for troubleshooting.

Configuration Modal

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The Destination’s configuration modal has helpful tabs for troubleshooting:

Live Data: Try capturing live data to see real-time events as they flow through the Destination. On the Live Data tab, click Start Capture to begin viewing real-time data.

Logs: Review and search the logs that provide detailed information about the delivery process, including any errors or warnings that may have occurred.

Test: Ensures that the Destination is correctly set up and reachable. Verify that sample events are sent correctly by clicking Run Test.

You can also view the Monitoring page that provides a comprehensive overview of data volume and rate, helping you identify delivery issues. Analyze the graphs showing events and bytes in/out over time.