Anthony Reinke Just getting a few things out of my head

Monitoring the Filesystem with Splunk

I have used OSSEC in the past to watch the file system for changes.  When I found that I can have the Splunk agent handle the monitoring itself, I was pretty excited.  Since I would send my OSSEC data to Splunk anyways, it just seemed logical to have Splunk do everything.

In Windows, you need to edit the "c:\program files\Splunk\etc\system\local\inputs.conf" file.  Of course your path could be different if you installed it in a different place.  There are a lot of options and switches you can use.  I went for the simplest set.

[fschange:d:\temp\]
recurse=true
pollPeriod=3600

This will monitor the d:\temp\ folder and all files and folders under it.  It will check the system every 3600 seconds (1 hour).

This has helped me keep track of the changes in my servers.  I can see when a file was add/deleted/changed (due to the hash) and then look at who was logged in during the period that the file was changed.

Splunk article on the switches and FSCHANGE.
http://www.splunk.com/base/Documentation/4.0.3/Admin/Monitorchangestoyourfilesystem