Integrate ITSI with Splunk Phantom

Integrate IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) and Splunk Phantom to automatically resolve issues in your IT environment. Splunk Phantom is an orchestration, automation, and response platform designed to help scale your IT and security operations. Splunk Phantom lets you automate tasks, orchestrate workflows, and support a broad range of NOC and SOC functions. For more information, see About Splunk Phantom in the Use Splunk Phantom manual.

With the ITSI integration with Splunk Phantom, you can send episodes directly to Splunk Phantom and run custom playbooks to resolve issues in your IT environment. This functionality lets you automate simple and complex IT operations workflows to increase service availability and operational efficiency.

The following diagram shows the end-to-end workflow of ingesting data into ITSI, triaging and routing issues with Event Analytics, and sending the issues to Splunk Phantom to be automatically resolved:

When you send an ITSI episode to Splunk Phantom, the episode itself is mapped to a container in Phantom and the notable events within the episode are mapped as artifacts of the container. The ITSI episode ID is mapped to the source ID of the Splunk Phantom container. The container then runs an associated playbook that performs the appropriate remediation steps.

Deployment requirements

You must have the following versions of these associated apps to integrate ITSI with Splunk Phantom:

Link to app	Version
Splunk Enterprise	7.3.3 or higher
IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)	4.7.0 or higher
Splunk Phantom	4.6 or higher
Phantom App for Splunk	4.0.10 or higher

Step 1: Create an automation user in Splunk Phantom

The automation user is a default internal service account used by Splunk Phantom for running automated playbooks and asset actions, such as data ingestion. The automation user provides REST authentication tokens that you can use to read and write data to the REST backend and perform other useful activities.

For instructions on adding an automation user, see Create an automation user in Splunk Phantom in the Administer Splunk Phantom manual.

Step 2: Configure the Phantom App for Splunk

Perform the following steps to configure Splunk Enterprise to work with Splunk Phantom.

Install the Phantom App for Splunk

Download and install version 4.0.10 or later of the Phantom App for Splunk from Splunkbase. Python 3 compatibility was introduced to the Phantom app in version 4.0.10, so you can't use earlier versions when integrating with ITSI.

Configure Splunk Phantom capabilities in Splunk Enterprise

You must provide specific capabilities to the admin role so Splunk administrators can set up the Splunk Phantom integration.

1. Within Splunk Enterprise, navigate to Settings > Roles (or Settings > Access controls > Roles in Splunk Enterprise versions earlier than 8.1.0).
2. Select the admin role.
3. On the Capabilities tab, verify that the admin role has the following capabilities:
   • admin_all_objects
   • phantom_read
   • phantom_write
   • list_storage_passwords
4. Click Save.

Disable HTTPS certificate validation

Configure HTTPS certificate validation by editing the phantom.conf configuration file for the Phantom App for Splunk.

Prerequisites

• Only users with file system access, such as system administrators, can disable HTTPS certificate validation in Splunk Phantom.
• Review the steps in How to edit a configuration file in the Splunk Enterprise Admin Manual.

Never change or copy the configuration files in the default directory. The files in the default directory must remain intact and in their original location.

1. Create a local version of the phantom.conf file at $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/phantom/local/.
2. Add the following stanza to disable HTTPS certificate validation:

   [verify_certs]
   value = false
   

3. Save the file and restart your Splunk software.

Configure the Phantom App for Splunk

Provide the automation user's REST API authorization token value to the Phantom App for Splunk.

1. Log in to Splunk Phantom as an administrative user.
2. From the Main Menu, select Administration.
3. Select User Management > Users.
4. Open the automation user you created in Step 1 and copy the JSON formatted automation configuration. For example:

   {
     "ph-auth-token": "cs76HmsNcWjkd6kWmGzUa18LcbtQx95vMW1bsdeP7gU=",
     "server": "https://172.16.210.137"
   }
   

5. Open the Phantom App for Splunk.
6. Click Configurations.
7. Click Create Server.
8. Paste the JSON token block into the Authorization Configuration box.
9. Click Save.
10. Restart your Splunk software.

For more information, see Edit an automation user to view the REST API authorization token and associated assets.

Step 4: Configure IT Service Intelligence

After you configure Splunk Phantom and the Phantom App for Splunk, configure your ITSI environment to send episodes to Phantom.

Create correlation searches

A correlation search is a recurring search that scans multiple data sources for defined patterns. You can configure a correlation search to generate a notable event, also known as an alert, when the search results meet specific conditions. As correlation searches begin to generate notable events, the events are grouped into episodes using the notable event aggregation policies you configure in the next step.

Configure several correlation searches to bring in data to ITSI that you want to aggregate and send to Splunk Phantom. For instructions on creating correlation searches, see Overview of correlation searches in ITSI.

Configure aggregation policies to send episodes to Splunk Phantom

Notable event aggregation policies group notable events into episodes and organize them in Episode Review. They also let you take automatic actions on an episode, such as sending it to Splunk Phantom, when certain trigger conditions are met.

Configure the action rules of one or more aggregation policies in your environment to send episodes to Splunk Phantom. For more information about configuring action rules, see Configure episode action rules in ITSI.

1. On the ITSI main menu, click Configuration > Notable Event Aggregation Policies and open an existing policy.
2. Go to the Action Rules tab.
3. Click +Add Rule or expand an existing action rule.
4. Provide an If condition.
   The following image shows the best practice, which is to send an episode to Splunk Phantom immediately after it's created, when the first event is added:
   
5. For the THEN condition, choose the action called Send to Phantom. The following example action rule sends an episode to Splunk Phantom:
   
6. Click Configure and configure the following Phantom fields:

   Field	Description
   Phantom Server	The Splunk Phantom server to send the episode to. Create and configure a Splunk Phantom server in the Phantom App for Splunk.
   Phantom Label	Splunk Phantom determines which playbooks to run for an ingested event based on the label associated with the event. Specify a label here to determine which playbooks to run. You can associate one or more labels to a playbook.

If you change the Phantom label after you initially create the aggregation policy, a new event with the new label is created in Phantom. Future notable events that are grouped by the aggregation policy are sent to that event.