Gravwell launched our free Community Edition in July 2018, and it has become an invaluable resource for home lab users and anyone looking to monitor their personal network or wrangle large amounts of data (up to 2GB/day) into actionable insights. In this blog post, Dustin Finn, one of our first CE users and recipient of the inaugural “CE User of the Year” Award, shares some of the cool projects he’s working on using Gravwell Community Edition.
Overview
Today we are going to talk about something very important - beer. Homebrewing has a long tradition and many master brewers started by making swill in their basement. So today, I am going to go over my homebrew setup, how it is instrumented, how I use low-cost sensors to monitor every stage; and how a little bit of automation saved a kegerator and a few carboys.
DNS auditing is an integral part of any I.T. security program. Name resolutions can act as a great tip for discovering malware, command and control streams, or misbehaving employees. Acquiring DNS audit data can be difficult with some DNS servers (*cough* Windows *cough*); for this post we are going to show an extremely easy method of getting DNS audit data directly into Gravwell.
Gravwell Community Edition is perfect for monitoring your home network. With a generous 2GB/day ingest quota, you can capture netflow records, DNS requests, WiFi hotspot associations, and more. In this blog post, we’ll show how to ingest and analyze netflow records. We’ll assume you’ve already set up a Gravwell instance as described in the quickstart (https://dev.gravwell.io/docs/#!quickstart/community-edition.md); for this post, we’ll assume the Gravwell instance is at 192.168.1.52. Your instance will almost certainly be different, so be sure to substitute your own information.
To celebrate the release of the Gravwell Community Edition we are also releasing a standalone collectd ingester. Collectd is an excellent tool for monitoring the health of hardware, systems, and applications. For this post we will be demonstrating the installation and configuration of collectd to monitor the health and status of a few machines. We will be providing dashboard import codes so that you can quickly and easily import our ready made dashboards. The collectd ingester is part of the core suite of ingesters and is open source on github.