Pluribus One WAS® and Data Sources
The Pluribus One WAS®, once installed and deployed within your infrastructure, can work as a simple traffic monitor or as part of a firewall system. Either way Pluribus One WAS® will need to read incoming traffic directed to your web services.
Connecting Pluribus One WAS® to a Data Source is called Data Source Configuration, and once this step is performed Pluribus One WAS® will be able to read all the incoming traffic from the Data Source. For more informations about Data Sources please refer to these articles: Pluribus One WAS® Introduction and Deploy Introduction .
Data Source Configuration is a pre-requisite whether you want to use Pluribus One WAS® as a traffic monitor or in firewall mode.
Data Source Technical Requirements
Pluribus One WAS® can read the traffic from a number of different Data Sources once a connection has been established but there are some requirements in order to make this possible. The Data Source must be able, while using encrypted connections (i.e., HTTPS, SSL/TLS over HTTP) to provide decrypted traffic data to Pluribus One WAS®.
The Data Source should be able to terminate the SSL/TLS session over HTTP and this requires the presence of a valid certificate being installed on the Data Source itself for the services that will be monitored. Please refer to the official documentation associated to the Data Source for information regarding how to implement, and properly test HTTPS encryption and decryption.
Pluribus One WAS® connection to Data Sources
The Pluribus One WAS® has four different ways to connect to a Data Source:
- Syslogs: A specific syslog format is defined on the Data Source and it is sent to the Pluribus One WAS® host.
- Database: Some products are equipped with an internal database on which the network traffic is stored while flowing through the product. If access to the data stored in the database can be granted to external solutions, Pluribus One WAS® can read the traffic directly from it.
- Connector: Using a dedicated Connector provided by Pluribus One, which is installed onto the same host where the Data Source virtual appliance is running.
- API: Many products make available an API to access the data. In such case, Pluribus One WAS® can leverage that API to use the product as a data source.
Pluribus One WAS® Data Source Support
Pluribus One WAS® can leverage several commercial and open source technologies as Data Sources. Support for freeware and open source Data Sources is provided free of charge while support for commercial technologies is provided via the general Input Plugin add-on.
The following table provides a list of all the currently supported Data Sources by Pluribus One WAS®.
| Data Source | Version | Syslog | Database | Connector | API |
| APACHE HTTP Server | Available | NA | NA | NA | |
| APACHE HTTP Server | Available | NA | NA | NA | |
| NGINX Plus | Available | NA | NA | NA | |
| NGINX Plus | NA | NA | NA | NA | |
| NGINX Plus | NA | NA | NA | NA | |
| OPLON NETWORKS LBL | NA | Input Plugin | NA | NA | |
| OPLON NETWORKS LBL | NA | Input Plugin | NA | NA | |
| PULSE SECURE Virtual Traffic Manager | 19.3 | Input Plugin | NA | NA | NA |
| PULSE SECURE Virtual Traffic Manager | Input Plugin | NA | NA | NA |
Some notes regarding the table above:
- Currently no Data Source is connected via a dedicated Connector. This approach is foreseen as a possible solution for new Data Sources.
- Currently no Data Source is connected via API. This approach is foreseen as a possible solution for new Data Sources.
- Within the table, NA is used as acronym for "Not Available".
For more information on how to configure the different types of Data Sources please refer to other pages within the documentation.