Table Of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Global Controller Overview

The Global Controller User Interface

About This Manual

Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request

Preface

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Introduction

Global Controller helps network administrators, network operators, and security analysts be more productive by:

•Reducing the amount of raw data you have to wade through

•Enabling you to see your network security posture as it evolves

•Identifying Hot Spots of malicious activity

•Removing unwanted traffic from your network.

Global Controller Overview

The Global Controller is a Security Threat Mitigation (STM) system. It summarizes information about the health of your network as viewed through the reporting devices.

The Global Controller:

•Collects all raw events,

•Sessionizes them across different devices,

•Fires default rules for incidents,

•Determines false positives, and

•Delivers consolidated information through diagrams, charts, queries, reports, and rules.

The Global Controller User Interface

The Global Controller system employs a Global Controller to monitor and manage Local Controllers and their monitored devices in the network. The Global Controller user interface uses a tabbed, hyperlinked, browser-based interface. If you have used the Web, you have used similar pages.

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Note When using the Global Controller user interface, avoid using the browser's Back and Forward buttons. Using these buttons can lead to unpredictable behavior.

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About This Manual

This manual describes the features and functionality of the Global Controller.

The layout of this manual is as follows:

•Chapter 1, "Introduction,"— This chapter introduces the Global Controller and presents its basic features and deployment options.

•Chapter 2, "Configuring the Global Controller,"— This chapter covers connecting to the Global Controller for the first time, and setting up and configuring your network security devices to connect to the Global Controller.

Part II: Monitoring Phase. This part concepts important to successfully using MARS to monitor your network. These concepts include defining inspection rules and investigating incidents.

•Chapter 3, "Authenticating MARS Accounts with External AAA Servers," describes how to configure AAA servers to authenticate MARS users.

•Chapter 4, "Network Summary," covers the Summary pages which includes the Dashboard, the Network Status, and the My Reports pages.

•Chapter 5, "Case Management," covers using cases to provide accountability and improve workflow.

•Chapter 6, "Incident Investigation and Mitigation,"covers incidents and false positives and provides a starting point for configuring a Layer 2 path and mitigation to work with a MARS.

•Chapter 7, "Queries and Reports," covers working with scheduled and on-demand reports and queries. It also discussing using the real-time event viewer.

•Chapter 8, "Rules," covers defining and use inspection rules.

•Chapter 9, "Sending Alerts and Incident Notifications," explains how to configure the MARS to send an alert based on an inspection rule.

•Chapter 10, "Management Tab Overview," covers managing events, networks, variables, hosts, services, and MARS users.

•Chapter 11, "System Maintenance," covers some of the maintenance chores for the MARS.

Additionally, the following appendices are provided:

•Appendix A, "Cisco Security MARS XML API Reference," represents the XML schema used by MARS for XML-based notifications.

•Appendix B, "Regular Expression Reference," The syntax and semantics of the regular expressions supported by PCRE are described in this appendix.

•Appendix C, "Date/Time Format Specfication," The date/time field parsing is supported using the Unix strptime() standard C library function.

•Appendix D, "System Rules and Reports," lists all MARS system rules and reports with their descriptions.

•Glossary — A glossary of terms as they relate to MARS.

Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request

For information on obtaining documentation, submitting a service request, and gathering additional information, see the monthly What's New in Cisco Product Documentation, which also lists all new and revised Cisco technical documentation, at:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/whatsnew/whatsnew.html

Subscribe to the What's New in Cisco Product Documentation as a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed and set content to be delivered directly to your desktop using a reader application. The RSS feeds are a free service and Cisco currently supports RSS Version 2.0.