Stream auth and activity logs to an external provider

This is an experimental feature.

With Portainer 2.20 and later, you can configure the streaming of Portainer's authentication and activity logs to an external Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system in Syslog format. This is done via CLI flags when starting the Portainer container.

Available CLI flags

Flag	Description
--syslog-address	Syslog Address to stream authentication and activity logs. FQDN or IP Address only.
--syslog-port	Syslog Port for the address above. Defaults to 514.
--syslog-protocol	Syslog Protocol to send logs to the Syslog Server. Supported values are udp, tcp, or tcp+tls. Defaults to udp.
--syslog-format	Syslog Format to be used. Supported values are rfc3164 or rfc5424. Defaults to rfc5424.
--syslog-source-hostname	The hostname value that will be shown in the Syslog server in the messages. Defaults to portainer.
--syslog-insecure-skip-verify	Disable TLS server verification when using tcp+tls protocol. Should only be enabled for testing. Defaults to false.
--syslog-ca-cert	The path to the trusted CA used by the Syslog server. Defaults to /syslog/certs/ca.pem.
--syslog-cert	The path to the client certificate that is used to authenticate to the Syslog server via mTLS. Defaults to /syslog/certs/cert.pem.
--syslog-key	The path to the client key that is used to authenticate to the Syslog server via mTLS. Defaults to /syslog/certs/key.pem.

Example usage

The following is an example docker run command to start Portainer using the above options to stream logs to a SIEM provider at syslog.mydomain.com on UDP port 514.

As the flags are Portainer options, they must be specified after the image specification.

docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9443:9443 \
    --name portainer \
    --restart=always \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    -v portainer_data:/data \
    portainer/portainer-ee:2.20.2 \
    --syslog-addr=syslog.mydomain.com \
    --syslog-port=514 \
    --syslog-source-hostname="my-portainer-instance"