Troubleshooting

This section offers some common problem-solution pairs, dedicated to both new and existing users. For more information, see the Siren Alert FAQ.

Debug Siren Alert

Ensure you have the following options in investigate.yml:

# Enables you specify a file where Siren Investigate stores log output.
logging.dest: stdout

# Set the value of this setting to true to suppress all logging output.
logging.silent: false

# Set the value of this setting to true to suppress all logging output
other than error messages. logging.quiet: false

# Set the value of this setting to true to log all events, including
system usage information # and all requests. logging.verbose: true

All messages which have Siren Alert in its status are messages related to Siren Alert.

No alert emails

Basic config, investigate.yml:

logging.verbose: true
sentinl:
  settings:
    email:
      active: true
      host: beast-cave
      ssl: false
    report:
      active: true
      tmp_path: /tmp/

Check your server using some email client, for example mailx:

mailx -S smtp=<smtp-server-address> -r <from-address> -s <subject> -v <to-address> < body.txt

Security exception while using Search Guard

For example, this message:

p-f45016r31z8-yok6hzhmmii: [security_exception] no permissions for indices:data/read/search :: {\"path\":\"/logstash-2017.09.22/_search\"    ,\"query\":{},\"body\":\"{}\",\"statusCode\":403,\"response\":\"{\\\"error\\\":{\\\"root_cause\\\":[{\\\"type\\\":\\\"security_exception\    \\",\\\"reason\\\":\\\"no permissions for indices:data/read/search\\\"}],\\\"type\\\":\\\"security_exception\\\",\\\"reason\\\":\\\"no permissions for indices:data/read/search\\\"},\\\"status\\\":403}\"}"}

It says Siren Alert cannot read indices:data/read/search the logstash-2017.09.22 index. Ensure you have the following role for logstash-* indices in sg_roles.yml:

# For the kibana server
sg_kibana_server:
  indices:
    'logstash-*':
      '*':
       - indices:data/read/search

Linux file permissions

The Siren Alert plugin requires two internal binaries (phantomjs and chrome) to be executable. If Siren Investigate is running as root, it can take care of this automatically. However, if Siren Investigate is running as an unprivileged user, for example in a hardened environment, you may see errors in the logs similar to this:

Jul 24 09:16:04 xxxxxxxx investigate[30856]: FATAL { Error: EPERM: operation not permitted, chmod '/xxxxxxx/siren-investigate-10.1.0-linux-x86_64/siren_plugins/sentinl/node_modules/phantomjs-prebuilt/bin/phantomjs'
Jul 24 09:17:42 xxxxxxxx investigate[32296]: [sentinl] fail to make report engine executable: EPERM: operation not permitted, chmod '/xxxxxxxx/siren-investigate-10.1.0-linux-x86_64/siren_plugins/sentinl/node_modules/puppeteer/.local-chromium/linux-564778/chrome-linux/chrome'!

Siren Investigate includes a post-installation utility that can be run by an administrator as root (or using sudo), that can fix these file permissions manually:

cd $INVESTIGATE_INSTALL_DIRECTORY/siren_plugins/sentinl/
../../node/bin/node ./postinst.js