Splunk to Sentinel Migration – Part IV – Searches

In Splunk, searches are saved queries. These queries can be used in any number of places, or simply just run when needed. Queries are built in the Splunk Programming Language (SPL).

In Part I of this series we discusses exporting the objects in the Splunk instance. Search queries you will discover are at the center of everything.

We have already discussed Alerts and how they use queries, but as we will see in the next post in this series other things like Dashboards and Reports also use them.

Searches

As we discusses in Part I of this series, we have to export the objects in Splunk as the first step. One of the things you will realize is that “Searches” is an overloaded term. In order to get dashboards and reports out, you have to hit the “searches” REST endpoint.

$url = "$apiUrl/servicesNS/-/search/saved/searches..."

When these object are exported, there are a few properties you will need to interrogate to determine what the search was created for:

  1. Report = {entry}.content.is_scheduled
  2. Dashboard = {entry}.content.isdashboard

We will explore these instances in the next series as they have other higher level components that must be considered, for the purposes of this blog, we simply want to discuss where are the possible places we can “save” these queries in Azure Sentinel.

  1. Sentinel Hunting Queries
  1. Sentinel Analytics (Scheduled Rule)
  1. Log Analytics (Saved Query)

Each of the items above have a different endpoint to create them:

#Hunting Query (Sentinel)
$url = "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/$subscriptionId/resourceGroups/$resourceGroupName/providers/Microsoft.OperationalInsights/workspaces/$workspaceName/savedSearches/$($id)?api-version=2017-04-26-preview"
#Scheduled Rule (Sentinel)
$url = "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/$subscriptionId/resourceGroups/$resourceGroupName/providers/Microsoft.OperationalInsights/workspaces/$workspaceName/providers/Microsoft.SecurityInsights/alertRules/$($ruleId)?api-version=2021-03-01-preview";
#Saved Query (Log Analytics)
$url = "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/$subscriptionId/resourceGroups/$resourceGroupName/providers/microsoft.insights/scheduledqueryrules/$($name)?api-version=2018-04-16";

Each of these endpoints require a POST with very specific properties to tell Sentinel or Log Analytics what to create and what it is for. For example, Azure Sentinel Hunting queries can be targeted at MITRE Framework Tactics, so you’d include those, however, Splunk has no concept of MITRE that you can pull from so you’d have to add that from a reference file.

As was discussed in the first post in this blog series, the above items are the easy part, its the tokenization of the Splunk query and then conversion to KQL that is the hard part.

Splunk to Sentinel Blog Series

  1. Part I – SPL to KQL, Exporting Objects
  2. Part II – Alerts and Alert Actions
  3. Part III – Lookups, Source Types and Indexes
  4. Part IV – Searches
  5. Part V – Dashboards and Reports
  6. Part VI – Users and Permissions
  7. Part VII – Apps

References:

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