Hi all!

I'll try to be quick but I apologise first as I am pretty new to security stuff and my questions might be obvious to the more experts.

I have a VPS (hetzner) set up with docker, caddy for the reverse proxy, and authentik as the only login method for a couple of services (hedgedoc and forgejo). Since most of these has to be available and accessible on the internet, I also setup crowdsec and built caddy with the relevant bouncer. This allows crowdsec to inspect the caddy logs for all the services I am serving through it and act accordingly. Edit: all the services are in docker containers.

So far, so good. However, I also saw that crowdsec can directly monitor container logs with the docker integration or through container labels. Also, I saw a couple of collections on crowdsec hub specifically for Authentik and Gitea.

I feel I am missing something so my question are:

1. Would it be useful to monitor container logs given my setup or would it be redundant?
2. Should I add the app-specific collections, or would docker logs monitoring be enough?

::: spoiler My current crowdsec collections

• crowdsecurity/linux
• crowdsecurity/appsec-generic-rules
• crowdsecurity/caddy
• crowdsecurity/whitelist-good-actors
• crowdsecurity/http-cve
• crowdsecurity/iptables
  :::

You only need Crowdsec to monitor the exposed service ports. If Authentik is exposed, and has a Crowdsec plugin, then add it. Otherwise, you're just wasting resources having it watch things it can't take action.

If you just need something to consolidate logs where you can watch them, use a centralized logging tool for that job.

Thanks for the answer make sense, I will go through with the plugins for the services I have exposed, although not all of them have crowdsec collections.

Hi all!

I'll try to be quick but I apologise first as I am pretty new to security stuff and my questions might be obvious to the more experts.

I have a VPS (hetzner) set up with docker, caddy for the reverse proxy, and authentik as the only login method for a couple of services (hedgedoc and forgejo). Since most of these has to be available and accessible on the internet, I also setup crowdsec and built caddy with the relevant bouncer. This allows crowdsec to inspect the caddy logs for all the services I am serving through it and act accordingly. Edit: all the services are in docker containers.

So far, so good. However, I also saw that crowdsec can directly monitor container logs with the docker integration or through container labels. Also, I saw a couple of collections on crowdsec hub specifically for Authentik and Gitea.

I feel I am missing something so my question are:

1. Would it be useful to monitor container logs given my setup or would it be redundant?
2. Should I add the app-specific collections, or would docker logs monitoring be enough?

::: spoiler My current crowdsec collections

• crowdsecurity/linux
• crowdsecurity/appsec-generic-rules
• crowdsecurity/caddy
• crowdsecurity/whitelist-good-actors
• crowdsecurity/http-cve
• crowdsecurity/iptables
  :::

You can easily create custom rules and bouncers if needed for something specific as well. They're templatized for the most part. Possibly even something a stupid AI could kick out, but make sure you know what it's doing, and don't trust it outright.

On the free plan, you should be able to set up 2 remediation components, 4 blocklists, and a variety of scenarios. For the scenarios, I'd only install what you have need for.

As far as logs, I personally think something more along the lines of Grafana+Loki+Alloy (Formerly Prometheus) for logs and metrics. You could even use something like lnav. Lnav is simple to install. It's not a dialed out dashboard of metrics, rather it keeps things simple. After install, to access it simply type lnav and the log location you wish to view: lnav /var/log/auth.log or lnav /var/log/syslog in the cli. Don't let it's simplicity fool you tho. It is quite capable.

I really tried with logging aps like ELK, Graylog, etc. I found them to be quite heavy for my environment. They certainly do have all the bells and whistles and pretty graphics, but again, it comes down to what can run on your server comfortably. I didn't want to eat up 2/3 of my resources just to look at logs. The Grafana+Loki+Alloy combo really sips the resources. I think for all I have Grafana monitoring, it clocks in at around 2+/- gb in used resources.

Thanks for the thorough reply! I didn't know about Inav, but it looks very interesting. I agree on the Grafana stack, it's not something I really need now, and if I have to inspect single containers I can go for something like Dozzle.

About crowdsec free plan, looking at the pricing page, I see that the community plan has unlimited remediation components and 3 blocklist + unlimited scenarios, or am I looking in the wrong place? (honestly that page is pretty confusing)