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Sophos Firewall

Sophos Firewall — the XG and XGS appliance line running SFOS — is the current Sophos network security product, and the successor to the older Sophos UTM platform. It combines stateful firewalling with web filtering, application control, intrusion prevention, sandboxing and remote access, and it can exchange health information with Sophos-managed endpoints so that a compromised host is isolated at the network edge. Its syslog output covers firewall decisions, web and application activity, IPS and antivirus detections, VPN sessions, ATP findings and administrative events.

Device-side setup​

Configure the device to forward syslog to the listener described below, following the vendor's own documentation for its syslog export. Nothing has to be built on the platform side beyond installing the template below — it supplies the parser and wires the pipeline.

Syslog configuration​

The appliance sends to a syslog listener: either the cloud syslog endpoint or a local collector appliance. The two destinations use different ports. The cloud endpoint has a per-tenant domain and a block of ports allocated to your account: Platform → Administration → Syslog Ports shows the domain, the port range, and which protocol listens on which port — read the numbers off that page rather than assuming a standard one. A collector appliance listens by default on UDP/514, TCP/514, TLS on 6514 and TLS RFC 6587 on 7514, and each of its listeners can carry a Customer Tag that attributes the records arriving on it. See Syslog Import for the protocol options and Syslog Ports for the listener configuration. Either TLS listener presents a certificate the sending device has to trust: the Download CA (ca.crt) button on the Syslog Ports page supplies it, and without it the handshake fails with nothing logged on the platform side.

Install the Application​

Go to Platform → Applications → Install Application From Template and choose Sophos Firewall Syslog from the On-Premise IT category, then press Install. The template takes no parameters: it supplies the parser and builds the pipeline, and the transport is configured on the syslog listener rather than on the form. There is no source to add, no processor to attach, and no sink to wire by hand.

Setup New Sophos Firewall Syslog Application panel

  • On-Prem / Syslog — other syslog devices.
  • Sophos UTM — the older Sophos appliance line, which has a different log format and its own parser.
  • Sophos EDR — the endpoint half of a Sophos deployment.
  • No parser cookbook exists yet for Sophos Firewall (XG/XGS). The template ships a working parser, so one is only needed if you want to customise the parsing; the parser cookbooks are the starting point if you do. Note that the Sophos UTM recipe there targets the older UTM product and its log format — it is not a substitute here.
  • Syslog Import and Syslog Ports — the transport and listener.