GCP traffic mirroring

Traffic mirroring can be used to capture a copy of the original data from the source network interface without disrupting your existing infrastructure and without adding any latency to your requests. For example, this mirrored data can be used for telemetry, attack detection, and so on. Traceable provides a GCP setup script that automates data collection by using traffic mirroring. Traceable uses open-source Suricata to capture mirrored traffic for further processing. The topic describes the steps to deploy Traceable’s platform agent and enable traffic mirroring using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) CLI.

For a specific VPC network and region, Traceable can mirror traffic from some or all the instances located in that region. Following is a high-level deployment diagram for Traceable agent in a GCP project.

Before you begin

• Make sure that you have a GCP account. This account should have access to the GCP project containing instances that you want to mirror.
• Roles: Your GCP account should have the following set of roles or higher in the GCP project where you wish to install Traceable agent:
  • roles/compute.admin 
  • roles/container.clusterViewer
  • roles/iam.serviceAccountUser
• Keep Traceable's access token handy. The token is used during installation to authenticate the agent. To copy the token, login to your Traceable Platform. In the top-right corner under your profile, navigate to Administration > Account > Agent Token and the click on the copy icon.

Download

There are no separate download steps. Traceable uses a setup script that automatically downloads the agent. 

Installation

Traceable Platform agent can be installed as follows:

1. Login to cloud console 
2. Download the setup script
3. Run the setup script

Step 1 - Login to cloud console

Navigate to Google cloud console and login with your account. Click on the terminal button in the top-right corner to activate Cloud Shell.

Step 2 - Download setup script

Complete the following steps:

1. Enter the following command to download the setup script:
   ActionScript
   ActionScript

   curl -o setup.sh https://downloads.traceable.ai/install/traffic-mirroring/gcp/latest/setup.sh                                             

2. Enter the following command to make the script executable:
   ActionScript
   ActionScript

   chmod +x setup.sh

Step 3 - Run the setup script

The setup script requires a config.yaml file to setup Traceable's traffic mirroring in your project. Complete the following steps:

1. Enter the following command to print sample config file:
   ActionScript
   ActionScript

   ./setup.sh sample-create

   Follow the sample to create config.yaml file. For example, if you want to mirror a regional GKE cluster my-regional-gke-cluster in region us-east4 in the project my-gcp-project, you may use:
   ActionScript
   YAML

   token: ***
   agentProject: my-gcp-project
   region: us-east4
   mirror:
     clusters:
       - name: my-regional-gke-cluster

   If you wish to mirror subnet my-subnetin the above example instead, then use:
   ActionScript
   YAML

   token: ***
   agentProject: my-gcp-project
   region: us-east4
   mirror:
     subnets:
       - my-subnet

   Note:

   Traceable Platform agent must be in the same region as the mirrored instances.
2. Enter the following command to run the script:
   ActionScript
   ActionScript

   ./setup.sh create config.yaml

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Verification

You can verify a successful installation of Traceable Platform agent for Google Cloud Platform by completing the following steps:

1. Log into the Traceable platform.
2. Select traffic-mirroring from the Environmentdrop-down list. 

This would display the mirrored data on the Traceable platform. 

You can also see the list of installed traffic mirroring agents by navigating to Administration > Configuration > Data Collection section and searching for traffic-mirroring agents.

Troubleshooting

Installation - login issue

gcloud config list

gcloud auth list

gcloud config set account <ACCOUNT>

Verification - No traces displayed in Traceable platform

If you can view agents in the Traceable platform, however, you do not see any traces:

• Make sure traffic is coming through your mirrored instances.
• In cloud console from top-left, navigate to ≡ > Compute Engine > Instance Groups. Look for the Traceable instance-group. Click on its name to display the page as shown below:

Choose any instance from the Instance Group Members list and click on SSH button as shown. This will open a new terminal to debug further.

Check traceable and suricata status

Check status of traceable and suricata agents by running the following commands:

sudo systemctl status traceable
sudo systemctl status suricata

If these appear to be working fine, navigate to /var/traceable/log to view log files. Log files are rotated and are timestamped. View the latest log file. All stats are printed at a 5-minute interval:

{"level":"info","time":"2021-09-03T13:19:13.302Z","message":"Stats", 
"service":"ext_cap","total":"412","post":"0","get":"387","put":"25", 
"delete":"0","head":"0","other":"0","20x":"412","30x":"0","40x":"0", 
"50x":"0","RCother":"0","header_summary_blobs_read":"0", 
"body_summary_blobs_read":"0","total_blobs_read":"496","queued_work": 
"0","active_routines":"0","queue_capacity":"5000","http1x":"412", 
"http2":"0","grpc":"0","errors":"0"}

If you need further assistance, reach out to Traceable support.

Upgrade

In Google cloud console navigate to ≡ > Compute Engine > Instance Groups. Look for the Traceable instance-group. Click on its name to display the page as shown below:

Click on Restart/Replace VMs button as shown. This will display a new page as shown below:Click on Restart button. This restarts all collector instances while upgrading the Traceable agent installed on them.

Pause

Creating Traceable resource config file traceable-b8613ac0.yaml

./setup.sh delete traceable-b8613ac0.yaml