11 KiB
SignalScope Roadmap
This roadmap tracks the path from the current local Graylog analytics agent to a production-ready, multi-source security analytics tool. Items are ordered by operational value and dependency, not by UI appeal.
Current Foundation
- Graylog MCP connection, stream discovery, field discovery, and stream selection.
- Per-stream profiles for entity, timestamp, categorical, and numeric fields.
- Local five-minute field baselines with duplicate-event protection.
- Time-aware baseline comparison using matching UTC weekday/hour when available.
- Generic entity correlation for IP addresses, users, and hostnames.
- Centralized common field alias normalization for firewall, DNS, proxy, endpoint, and web logs.
- Cross-stream correlation timelines and investigation incident grouping.
- Field-deviation review: expected, false positive, confirmed, note, and expiry.
- Local Ollama analyst assessment with incident and feedback context.
- Cached AbuseIPDB/VirusTotal enrichment with a daily request budget.
- Prometheus-compatible low-cardinality metrics endpoint.
- Local dashboard for status, findings, incidents, diagnostics, and configuration.
0. Structural Rework: Shape-Validated Discovery, Shared Baselines, Clustered Findings
Goal: fix root causes found by auditing a real 25-stream / ~1M-event/day
production deployment, instead of continuing to patch symptoms in the UI. See
ARCHITECTURE.md for the full data-flow diagram and the
detailed rationale behind each item below. This section blocks/supersedes
parts of sections 1 and 6 below (baseline confidence tooling and compact
incident cards both depend on findings being clustered correctly first) — do
this section before spending more effort on either.
- Validate name-matched fields against observed value shape too, not just
fields that had no name match. A field that matches a trusted name (e.g.
context) but is actually free-text (a full raw log line, confirmed in 12 of 25 audited stream profiles) must not be trusted just because its name matched a known-useful alias. - Make relationship-candidate selection shape-aware: never propose a
free-text-shaped field as a relationship target, regardless of how it
entered
categorical_fields. This alone was responsible for 17 of 25 entries in one real triage queue snapshot (91 individualnew_relationshipdeviations from a single misconfigured*->contextpairing, repeated across 5 streams). - Re-validate existing stored profiles'
relationship_fieldsandcategorical_fieldsagainst current observed shapes on an ongoing basis, not just at profile-creation time — flag (never silently rewrite) fields that no longer look fit for their assigned role, and surface a one-click "remove this field from relationships" action from the flag. - Pool baseline state by shared entity concept across streams that shared-field discovery already recognizes as the same real-world entity (for example a source IP seen in both a firewall stream and an IIS stream), instead of a cold, isolated baseline per stream per field. A value already known-normal in one contributing stream must not register as "new" the first time a different, related stream happens to see it.
- Cluster field deviations by
(detector, field, value-pattern)signature before scoring, not after. A pattern recurring identically across many entities must surface as one clustered item with an occurrence count and a "how many entities" breakdown, not N independently-scored "critical" rows that all have to be discovered, selected, and bulk-cleared by hand after the fact. - Recalibrate severity so cluster size is itself a signal: a pattern hitting many unrelated entities identically is usually a configuration/detector problem, not N separate critical incidents, and should score at or below an isolated occurrence, never above it.
- Update README usage documentation alongside each item above as it ships — a behavior change is not done until it is documented.
Acceptance: replaying the dataset that produced the original 25-entry, all-"critical" triage queue (17 of them the same misconfigured relationship) produces a small number of distinct, correctly-ranked items, with the systemic pattern visible as one clustered entry showing "91 occurrences across 5 streams," not 17 separate critical rows.
1. Detection Quality
Goal: make findings more accurate before adding more integrations.
- Add baseline confidence based on sample count and time-bucket coverage.
- Add generic event-rate burst detection per stream/entity.
- Add rare-value detection with a minimum historical observation threshold.
- Add detector-specific authentication failure, DNS volume, and denied-traffic burst thresholds.
- Add configurable per-field detector weights.
- Add sequence detection, for example DNS lookup -> outbound connection -> authentication event.
- Add per-stream detector enablement and thresholds in the UI.
- Add a dry-run replay command for historic JSONL or Graylog exports using temporary baselines.
- Add direct Graylog MCP time-range replay and result comparison against saved detector configurations.
- Add dashboard controls for launching safe replay jobs and viewing detector deltas.
- Add baseline confidence tooling: per detector learning state, expected false-positive rate, and why a deviation crossed threshold.
- Add baseline maintenance tooling in the dashboard for retention, high-cardinality fields, and database compaction status.
- Add observed-field profile recommendations so streams can get suggested entity, time, categorical, numeric, and detector settings.
- Add optional Ollama profile advisor with validated JSON output for semantic field mapping.
Acceptance: each finding shows its detector, confidence, baseline sample count, current value, expected value, and a bounded set of raw-event references.
2. Entity and Incident Investigation
Goal: make one incident answer what happened, to whom, and across which sources.
- Allow multiple entity fields per stream, such as user plus source IP plus hostname.
- Add entity aliasing: map DHCP, VPN, DNS, and endpoint identities to the same host where evidence supports it.
- Add incident lifecycle: open, acknowledged, resolved, reopened.
- Persist incident state and analyst notes separately from transient detection output.
- Add direct Graylog query links or query details for each timeline event.
- Add investigation export as JSON and Markdown report.
- Add guided investigation tools that compare a selected incident against its baseline, related entities, and similar prior outcomes.
Acceptance: an analyst can open an incident, see an ordered multi-stream timeline, review evidence, and record an outcome without losing it after the next monitor poll.
3. Feedback and Learning Controls
Goal: reduce repeat noise without hiding genuinely new behavior.
- Show active feedback rules, expiry, scope, author, and matching findings in the UI.
- Support feedback scope choices: exact value, entity and field, entire entity, or stream-wide rule.
- Require an expiry for broad suppressions and warn before a broad rule is saved.
- Track detector precision using confirmed versus false-positive feedback.
- Include feedback-derived precision and suppression counts in metrics and diagnostics.
Acceptance: a false-positive decision suppresses only the intended pattern and all suppressions are auditable and reversible.
4. Threat Intelligence and Enrichment
Goal: enrich public indicators predictably without exhausting provider quotas.
- Make cache TTL and daily budget configurable in the dashboard.
- Add provider health, cache hit ratio, and quota/budget visibility.
- Add domain and URL enrichment behind separate provider budgets.
- Keep enrichment asynchronous so a slow provider never delays monitoring.
- Store enrichment provenance and observation timestamps with incident evidence.
Acceptance: no refresh cycle causes uncontrolled external lookups, and every reputation result shows provider, timestamp, and cache state.
5. Production Operations
Goal: run reliably in a monitored environment.
- Add systemd unit files for monitor, dashboard, and optional local syslog listener.
- Add health and readiness endpoints with last successful Graylog fetch time.
- Add configurable retention for baseline buckets and high-cardinality field values.
- Add structured application logs and configurable retention for status/history data.
- Add backup and migration procedure for SQLite state.
- Add Checkmk local-check output in addition to Prometheus metrics.
- Add authentication/reverse-proxy guidance before exposing the dashboard beyond loopback.
Acceptance: deployment, restart, upgrade, backup, and monitoring have documented, repeatable procedures.
6. Dashboard Usability
Goal: optimize the UI for security investigation rather than raw tables.
- Separate stream enablement from one-profile-at-a-time profile editing.
- Add stream coverage diagnostics for enabled/profiled/ready/no-event streams.
- Replace remaining long tables with compact incident and entity cards where appropriate.
- Add incident filters for stream, severity, entity type, review state, and time range.
- Add baseline versus current charts per selected entity and field.
- Add an interactive entity graph backed by actual correlations.
- Preserve user view state, filters, expanded evidence, and selected tab across refreshes.
- Add visual data-quality warnings for missing timestamps, entity fields, or truncated Graylog results.
Acceptance: common triage can be completed from the dashboard without manually parsing raw JSON or searching for stream IDs.
7. Integrations and Extensibility
Goal: add log sources and outputs without adding source-specific logic everywhere.
- Define versioned stream-profile templates for FortiGate, Windows, DNS/AdGuard, Nginx, Squid, VPN, and Proxmox.
- Add inventory-style stream coverage to guide which streams need profiles before templates are added.
- Add common alias normalizer so new firewall/proxy/DNS streams can populate source, destination, action, severity, service, and context without source-specific code.
- Add generated stream-profile recommendations from observed common denominators.
- Add import/export for profile templates and detector settings.
- Separate source adapters, normalizers, detectors, enrichers, and output adapters into explicit extension interfaces.
- Add optional webhook/SIEM ticket output for confirmed high-severity incidents.
- Add role-aware configuration only if the dashboard is moved beyond single-user local operation.
Acceptance: adding a new Graylog stream normally requires a profile template and configuration, not a core-code change.
Suggested Next Milestone
Complete section 0 (Structural Rework) first. It was added after auditing a
real production deployment and finding that the existing Detection Quality
and Dashboard Usability work, while individually correct, sits on top of a
discovery/scoring pipeline that lets one misconfigured field flood the triage
queue with dozens of look-alike "critical" entries. Fixing the pipeline is
higher leverage than any further UI work until it's done — see
ARCHITECTURE.md.