A Comprehensive Guide to How Snare Works

Snare is a powerful solution that optimizes how organizations collect, store, and forward data, particularly when integrated with your SIEM. Snare improves data management, significantly reducing costs while maintaining full compliance and security visibility. 

Snare offers multiple financial benefits for organizations using security information and event management (SIEM) platforms: 

 

1. Reduction in ingestion costs

Snare helps reduce ingestion costs by up to 40% without compromising data integrity or volume. 

Organizations can lower their indexing costs significantly by filtering only critical data before sending it to before sending it to their SIEM. 

2. Lower storage costs

Snare reduces storage costs by approximately 85% for organizations that need to store data beyond 90 days, supporting long-term retention without excessive expenses.  

Snare achieves this by compressing data down to just 15% of its original size. 

3. Infrastructure cost savings

Snare minimizes infrastructure requirements by reducing the need for many heavy forwarders, leading to significant cost reductions in hardware and maintenance. 

4. Reduced management costs

Optimized data handling, lower infrastructure requirements, and centralized management, significantly reduce the overall operational costs of running a SIEM environment. 

Security teams can focus on threat analysis rather than SIEM management by eliminating unnecessary storage and ingestion costs. 

5. Total cost savings

Snare can help organizations cut their total SIEM costs by approximately 50%. 

As an example, Snare can save approximately US$1 million over three years for an organization spending US$1.8 million on Splunk. 

Organizations leveraging Snare can expect:

  • Greater coverage of logging data: ingest additional application data that might currently be excluded due to budget constraints.
  • Increased monitoring of endpoints: monitor more endpoints without additional ingestion or storage costs.
  • Improved data quality: maintain data integrity, enhance integrations with endpoint data sources, and reduce noise from agents and heavy forwarders to improve data accuracy.
  • Enhanced compliance: store up to seven years of historical data on-premises or in the cloud, supported by Snare’s storage compression.
  • Vendor independence: feed data into any SIEM using Snare’s agnostic stack, reducing vendor dependency.
  • Reduced risk of corporate fines: mitigate regulatory risks with comprehensive data storage and compliance support.

How Snare works

1. Data collection and compression

Snare receives all events from data sources and reduces data volume through ingestion methods without compromising integrity. 

Exceptional log compression (up to 85%) makes long-term storage cost-effective. 

2. Integration with heavy forwarders

Snare seamlessly integrates with existing heavy forwarders. 

It filters and forwards data to SIEM indexers, reducing the need for multiple heavy forwarders in an environment. 

Snare Reflector

Snare’s Reflector component consists of:

  • Listener: receives data from heavy forwarders.
  • Filtering: sends only critical events to the SIEM while retaining all data within Snare.
  • Storage: stores all data, including filtered-out information, in its native format.
  • Forwarding: forwards data to multiple destinations, such as on-premises or cloud-based SIEMs.

Storage compression model

Snare compresses stored data by around 85% or higher, making long-term storage cost-effective while ensuring compliance. 

This lets organizations retain more data and meet regulatory requirements without excessive costs. 

Reporting and query management

Snare offers a robust user interface (UI) for searching and managing stored data: 

    • Customizable report builder with scheduling options for daily, weekly, or specific reports tailored to auditor needs. 
    • Out-of-the-box compliance reports and the ability to generate custom reports for management. 
    • Proprietary search language that supports both basic and advanced search modes. 

Snare Agents

Snare provides lightweight logging agents that can operate alongside or replace existing infrastructure inside SIEM platforms:

    • Reduced hardware needs: Snare Agents eliminate the need for multiple heavy forwarders, reducing hardware and management costs.
    • Simplified management: centralized management via Snare Central eliminates the need for endpoint scripting, and Agents can be managed directly from Snare Central with multiple configurations.
    • Additional logging: Snare Agents deliver additional logging data that may not currently be captured by heavy forwarders. They also provide data caching capabilities to ensure no data loss.

Snare Central

The Snare Central component consists of: 

    • Listener: receives events from heavy forwarders and forwards them to the sender for filtering.
    • Sender: filters data before forwarding it to SIEM technologies, reducing ingestion volume.
    • Storage: stores all data in its native format, accessible via the Snare user interface (UI) for searches and reporting. No need for exporting data, storing it in a database, or using a data lake.
    • Reporting: customizable reports can be scheduled and sent to users, providing insights into data ingestion and compliance.
Snare Central Extended Event Coverage

Search and reporting capabilities

Search facility

Offers a comprehensive search tool with basic and advanced search modes.

Searches can be saved, scheduled, and customized.

Supports reviewing filtered data that has been sent to the SIEM

Data retention

Stores events for up to seven years for long-term compliance and audit readiness.

Custom reports

Generates detailed reports on all events, including filtered data sent to the SIEM.

Provides visual tools like heatmaps and column charts to illustrate data volumes and compression rates.

SIEM integration

    • Standard environment setup: universal event forwarders send data to SIEM heavy forwarders, which then send 100% of their data to Snare’s receiver.
    • Data flow: universal event forwarders send data to SIEM heavy forwarders.
    • Configuration: SIEM heavy forwarders are configured to send 100% of the data to Snare’s receiver.
    • Storage and compression: Snare stores and compresses all data to just 15% of its original size without compromising data quality.
    • Filtering: critical events are filtered and forwarded to SIEM, reducing ingestion by up to 40%.
    • Flexible data forwarding: all data can be sent to other destinations, such as S3 buckets or different SIEM platforms.

Ready to see Snare in action? Book a demo now or contact us to learn more.