You are implementing Google Security Operations (SecOps) with multiple log sources.

Google Security-Operations-Engineer Question Answer

You are implementing Google Security Operations (SecOps) with multiple log sources. You want to closely monitor the health of the ingestion pipeline's forwarders and collection agents, and detect silent sources within five minutes. What should you do?

Create an ingestion notification for health metrics in Cloud Monitoring based on the total ingested log count for each collector_id.

Create a notification in Cloud Monitoring using a metric-absence condition based on sample policy for each collector_id.

Create a Looker dashboard that queries the BigQuery ingestion metrics schema for each log_type and collector_id.

Create a Google SecOps dashboard that shows the ingestion metrics for each iog_cype and collector_id.

Explanation:

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation

The correct solution is Option B. This question requires a low-latency (5 minutes) notification for a silent source.

The other options are incorrect for two main reasons:

Dashboards vs. Notifications: Options C and D are incorrect because dashboards (both in Looker and Google SecOps) are for visualization, not active, real-time alerting. They show you the status when you look at them but do not proactively notify you of a failure.

Metric-Absence vs. Metric-Value: Google SecOps streams all its ingestion health metrics to Google Cloud Monitoring, which is the correct tool for real-time alerting. However, Option A is monitoring the "total ingested log count." This metric would require a threshold (e.g., count < 1), which can be problematic. The specific and most reliable method to detect a "silent source" (one that has stopped sending data entirely) is to use a metric-absence condition. This type of policy in Cloud Monitoring triggers only when the platform stops receiving data for a specific metric (grouped by collector_id) for a defined duration (e.g., five minutes).

Exact Extract from Google Security Operations Documents:

Use Cloud Monitoring for ingestion insights: Google SecOps uses Cloud Monitoring to send the ingestion notifications. Use this feature for ingestion notifications and ingestion volume viewing... You can integrate email notifications into existing workflows.

Set up a sample policy to detect silent Google SecOps collection agents:

In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring.

Click Create Policy.

Select a metric, such as chronicle.googleapis.com/ingestion/log_count.

In the Transform data section, set the Time series group by to collector_id.

Click Next.

Select Metric absence and do the following:

Set Alert trigger to Any time series violates.

Set Trigger absence time to a time (e.g., 5 minutes).

In the Notifications and name section, select a notification channel.

[References:, Google Cloud Documentation: Google Security Operations > Documentation > Ingestion > Use Cloud Monitoring for ingestion insights, , ]

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