Azure Web Application Firewall monitoring and logging

Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) monitoring and logging are provided through logging and integration with Azure Monitor and Azure Monitor logs.

Azure Monitor

Front Door's WAF log is integrated with Azure Monitor. Azure Monitor enables you to track diagnostic information including WAF alerts and logs. You can configure WAF monitoring within the Front Door resource in the portal under the Diagnostics tab, through infrastructure as code approaches, or by using the Azure Monitor service directly.

From Azure portal, go to Front Door resource type. From Monitoring/Metrics tab on the left, you can add WebApplicationFirewallRequestCount to track number of requests that match WAF rules. Custom filters can be created based on action types and rule names.

Logs and diagnostics

WAF with Front Door provides detailed reporting on each request, and each threat that it detects. Logging is integrated with Azure's diagnostics logs and alerts. These logs can be integrated with Azure Monitor logs.

Front Door provides two types of logs: access logs and WAF logs.

Access logs

The FrontDoorAccessLog includes all requests that go through Front Door. For more information on the Front Door access log, including the log schema, see Azure Front Door logs.

The FrontdoorAccessLog includes all requests that go through Front Door. For more information on the Front Door access log, including the log schema, see Monitoring metrics and logs in Azure Front Door (classic).

The following example query returns the access log entries:

AzureDiagnostics
| where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.CDN" and Category == "FrontDoorAccessLog"

AzureDiagnostics
| where ResourceType == "FRONTDOORS" and Category == "FrontdoorAccessLog"

The following shows an example log entry:

{
  "time": "2020-06-09T22:32:17.8383427Z",
  "category": "FrontdoorAccessLog",
  "operationName": "Microsoft.Network/FrontDoor/AccessLog/Write",
  "properties": {
    "trackingReference": "08Q3gXgAAAAAe0s71BET/QYwmqtpHO7uAU0pDRURHRTA1MDgANjMxNTAwZDAtOTRiNS00YzIwLTljY2YtNjFhNzMyOWQyYTgy",
    "httpMethod": "GET",
    "httpVersion": "2.0",
    "requestUri": "https://wafdemofrontdoorwebapp.azurefd.net:443/?q=%27%20or%201=1",
    "requestBytes": "715",
    "responseBytes": "380",
    "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/85.0.4157.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/85.0.531.1",
    "clientIp": "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx",
    "socketIp": "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx",
    "clientPort": "52097",
    "timeTaken": "0.003",
    "securityProtocol": "TLS 1.2",
    "routingRuleName": "WAFdemoWebAppRouting",
    "rulesEngineMatchNames": [],
    "backendHostname": "wafdemowebappuscentral.azurewebsites.net:443",
    "sentToOriginShield": false,
    "httpStatusCode": "403",
    "httpStatusDetails": "403",
    "pop": "SJC",
    "cacheStatus": "CONFIG_NOCACHE"
  }
}

WAF logs

The FrontDoorWebApplicationFirewallLog includes requests that match a WAF rule.

The FrontdoorWebApplicationFirewallLog includes any request that matches a WAF rule.

The following table shows the values logged for each request:

Property	Description
Action	Action taken on the request. Logs include requests with all actions. Metrics include requests with all actions except Log.
ClientIp	The IP address of the client that made the request. If there was an X-Forwarded-For header in the request, the client IP address is taken from that header field instead.
ClientPort	The IP port of the client that made the request.
Details	Additional details on the request, including any threats that were detected. matchVariableName: HTTP parameter name of the request matched, for example, header names (up to 100 characters maximum). matchVariableValue: Values that triggered the match (up to 100 characters maximum).
Host	The Host header of the request.
Policy	The name of the WAF policy that processed the request.
PolicyMode	Operations mode of the WAF policy. Possible values are Prevention and Detection.
RequestUri	Full URI of the request.
RuleName	The name of the WAF rule that the request matched.
SocketIp	The source IP address seen by WAF. This IP address is based on the TCP session, and does not consider any request headers.
TrackingReference	The unique reference string that identifies a request served by Front Door. This value is sent to the client in the X-Azure-Ref response header. Use this field when searching for a specific request in the log.

The following example query shows the requests that were blocked by the Front Door WAF:

AzureDiagnostics
| where ResourceType == "FRONTDOORS" and Category == "FrontdoorWebApplicationFirewallLog"
| where action_s == "Block"

AzureDiagnostics 
| where ResourceProvider == "MICROSOFT.CDN" and Category == "FrontDoorWebApplicationFirewallLog" 
| where action_s == "Block" 

The following shows an example log entry, including the reason that the request was blocked:

{
  "time": "2020-06-09T22:32:17.8376810Z",
  "category": "FrontdoorWebApplicationFirewallLog",
  "operationName": "Microsoft.Network/FrontDoorWebApplicationFirewallLog/Write",
  "properties": {
    "clientIP": "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx",
    "clientPort": "52097",
    "socketIP": "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx",
    "requestUri": "https://wafdemofrontdoorwebapp.azurefd.net:443/?q=%27%20or%201=1",
    "ruleName": "Microsoft_DefaultRuleSet-1.1-SQLI-942100",
    "policy": "WafDemoCustomPolicy",
    "action": "Block",
    "host": "wafdemofrontdoorwebapp.azurefd.net",
    "trackingReference": "08Q3gXgAAAAAe0s71BET/QYwmqtpHO7uAU0pDRURHRTA1MDgANjMxNTAwZDAtOTRiNS00YzIwLTljY2YtNjFhNzMyOWQyYTgy",
    "policyMode": "prevention",
    "details": {
      "matches": [
        {
          "matchVariableName": "QueryParamValue:q",
          "matchVariableValue": "' or 1=1"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Next steps

• Learn more about Front Door.