Plenty of people generate Zeek logs, but not everyone knows what to do with them. 

We asked the Zeek community to share their real-world approaches, and they delivered. We heard everything from automation scripts to quantum cryptography research and, honestly, we learned as much as we hope you will.

Here’s our recap of October’s topic of the month discussion focused on Zeek logs—specifically, how Zeek community members are actually using them.

1. Automate the Boring Stuff (and Block Threats Fast)

Some teams treat Zeek logs as an automated defense mechanism, feeding them directly into blocking workflows. 

One member identifies heavy scanners, DNS reconnaissance, and connection flooders from the logs, then automatically blocks them through their SIEM. Another uses the bro-simple-scan package, which detects various scans via Zeek scripting, for automated IP blocking.

It’s a straightforward use case, but effective: let the logs do the heavy lifting on repeat offenders.

2. Investigate and Hunt for Answers

Of course, it’s no surprise to learn that many use logs for forensics and active threat hunting. Some examples we saw include relying on Zeek files extensively for forensic purposes, like investigating compromised virtual machines, and pivoting between DHCP, DNS, and conn.log in order to gain more knowledge about particular IP addresses. 

Others turn network questions into queries: Who are the top talkers? What services are running on uncommon ports? Why are unauthorized DNS servers active? 

Whether they’re used for reactive investigations or proactive hunting, it’s clear that logs provide the visibility teams need to find answers.

3. Integrate Them into Your Security Stack

For some, Zeek logs are the foundation of an entire security stack. Several people shared full pipelines: logs get forwarded through tools like Filebeat or Vector, normalized in Logstash or VRL, and enriched with asset inventory lookups before landing in Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or ClickHouse. 

The key for many users is making dashboards “actually actionable”: pivoting to full packet capture, correlating to other logs, or feeding into DSPM and XDR platforms. Pre-built dashboards and completely custom interfaces both give users the capabilities they need for their particular environment. 

It was helpful to see these complete workflows mapped out to understand how everything connects.

4. Analyze with Simple Tools

But you don’t need all that complexity. Simple command-line tools handle a lot. 

One community member working with CERN and Square Kilometer Array partnerships shared that they rely on awk, shell scripts, and OpenSearch. Another uses awk and zgrep for quick searches on compressed logs. Some users also store Zeek logs in the simplest possible location: directly on disk, no forwarding needed.

No complex pipelines required. This was a good reminder that sometimes the simplest approach is the right one.

5. Feed Them into Custom Tools and Research

Some people use Zeek logs to power their own tools and studies. One developer shared how their ML-based intrusion prevention system reads Zeek flows and feeds them into behavioral detection modules. 

On the research side, researchers use logs to measure adoption rates of quantum-resistant cryptographic protocols and characterize attack patterns in longitudinal datasets. It was pretty cool for us to see logs powering everything from real-time threat detection to published academic research.

Have Your Own Approach?

We covered just a few of the themes we saw from our community, but there are plenty more ways to use logs. If your workflow looks different than what was shared, or if you’ve solved challenges with storage, parsing, or scale that we didn’t touch on, we’d love to hear about it in our #topic-of-the-month channel on Slack.

Join the Conversation

Want to catch up on the full discussion about logs? Head to #topic-of-the-month in our Slack workspace to read the detailed stories, share your own approach, or see what November’s topic is. These conversations are better when more people join in.

Thanks to everyone who shared this month: Mark, Seth, Phuong, Jim, Doug, Ryan, Alya, Eric, Fupeng, and our anonymous contributors.