Download the release on GitHub.
Features
Section titled “Features”Parquet store plugin
Section titled “Parquet store plugin”A new parquet store plugin allows VAST to store its data as parquet files, increasing storage efficiency at the expense of higher deserialization costs. Storage requirements for the VAST database is reduced by another 15-20% compared to the existing segment store with Zstd compression enabled. CPU usage for suricata import is up ~ 10%, mostly related to the more expensive serialization. Deserialization (reading) of a partition is significantly more expensive, increasing CPU utilization by about 100%, and should be carefully considered and compared to the potential reduction in storage cost and I/O operations.
By @dispanser in #2284.
Report by schema metrics from the importer
Section titled “Report by schema metrics from the importer”VAST now produces additional metrics under the keys ingest.events,
ingest.duration and ingest.rate. Each of those gets issued once for every
schema that VAST ingested during the measurement period. Use the
metadata_schema key to disambiguate the metrics.
Compress in-memory slices with Zstd
Section titled “Compress in-memory slices with Zstd”VAST now compresses data with Zstd. When persisting data to the segment store,
the default configuration achieves over 2x space savings. When transferring data
between client and server processes, compression reduces the amount of
transferred data by up to 5x. This allowed us to increase the default partition
size from 1,048,576 to 4,194,304 events, and the default number of events in a
single batch from 1,024 to 65,536. The performance increase comes at the cost of
a ~20% memory footprint increase at peak load. Use the option
vast.max-partition-size to tune this space-time tradeoff.
By @dominiklohmann in #2268.
Add percentage of total number of events to index status
Section titled “Add percentage of total number of events to index status”The index statistics in vast status --detailed now show the event distribution
per schema as a percentage of the total number of events in addition to the
per-schema number, e.g., for suricata.flow events under the key
index.statistics.layouts.suricata.flow.percentage.
By @dominiklohmann in #2351.
PRs 2360-2363
Section titled “PRs 2360-2363”The output vast status --detailed now shows metadata from all partitions under
the key .catalog.partitions. Additionally, the catalog emits metrics under the
key catalog.num-events and catalog.num-partitions containing the number of
events and partitions respectively. The metrics contain the schema name in the
field metadata_schema and the (internal) partition version in the field
metadata_partition-version.
By @dominiklohmann in #2360.
Base image with Closed Source plugins
Section titled “Base image with Closed Source plugins”The VAST Cloud CLI can now authenticate to the Tenzir private registry and download the vast-pro image (including plugins such as Matcher). The deployment script can now be configured to use a specific image and can thus be set to use vast-pro.
Add new debugging features to VAST tools
Section titled “Add new debugging features to VAST tools”The lsvast tool can now print contents of individual .mdx files.
It now has an option to print raw Bloom filter contents of string
and IP address synopses.
The mdx-regenerate tool was renamed to vast-regenerate and can
now also regenerate an index file from a list of partition UUIDs.
PRs 2334-KaanSK
Section titled “PRs 2334-KaanSK”PyVAST now supports running client commands for VAST servers running in a
container environment, if no local VAST binary is available. Specify the
container keyword to customize this behavior. It defaults to {"runtime": "docker", "name": "vast"}.
Add index metric for created active partitions
Section titled “Add index metric for created active partitions”VAST emits the new metric partition.events-written when writing a partition to
disk. The metric’s value is the number of events written, and the
metadata_schema field contains the name of the partition’s schema.
Improve usability of CSV format
Section titled “Improve usability of CSV format”The csv import gained a new --seperator='x' option that defaults to ','. Set
it to '\t' to import tab-separated values, or ' ' to import space-separated
values.
By @dominiklohmann in #2336.
Add a rebuild command plugin
Section titled “Add a rebuild command plugin”The new rebuild command rebuilds old partitions to take advantage
of improvements in newer VAST versions. Rebuilding takes place in the VAST
server in the background. This process merges partitions up to the configured
max-partition-size, turns VAST v1.x’s heterogeneous into VAST v2.x’s
homogenous partitions, migrates all data to the currently configured
store-backend, and upgrades to the most recent internal batch encoding and
indexes.
By @dominiklohmann in #2321.
Compress serialized indexers
Section titled “Compress serialized indexers”VAST now compresses on-disk indexes with Zstd, resulting in a 50-80% size
reduction depending on the type of indexes used, and reducing the overall index
size to below the raw data size. This improves retention spans significantly.
For example, using the default configuration, the indexes for suricata.ftp
events now use 75% less disk space, and suricata.flow 30% less.
By @dominiklohmann in #2346.
Add optional status command filters
Section titled “Add optional status command filters”The status command now supports filtering by component name. E.g.,
vast status importer index only shows the status of the importer and
index components.
By @dominiklohmann in #2288.
Changes
Section titled “Changes”Parquet store plugin
Section titled “Parquet store plugin”VAST now requires Arrow >= v8.0.0.
By @dispanser in #2284.
Always format time values with microsecond precision
Section titled “Always format time values with microsecond precision”VAST will from now on always format time and timestamp values with six
decimal places (microsecond precision). The old behavior used a precision that
depended on the actual value. This may require action for downstream tooling
like metrics collectors that expect nanosecond granularity.
Remove legacy index from VAST
Section titled “Remove legacy index from VAST”The vast.use-legacy-query-scheduler option is now ignored because the legacy
query scheduler has been removed.
Deprecate the archive store-backend
Section titled “Deprecate the archive store-backend”The vast.store-backend configuration option no longer supports archive,
and instead always uses the superior segment-store instead. Events stored in
the archive will continue to be available in queries.
By @dominiklohmann in #2290.
Write homogenous partitions from the partition transformer
Section titled “Write homogenous partitions from the partition transformer”Partition transforms now always emit homogenous partitions, i.e., one schema per partition. This makes compaction and aging more efficient.
Add new debugging features to VAST tools
Section titled “Add new debugging features to VAST tools”The mdx-regenerate tool is no longer part of VAST binary releases.
Bug Fixes
Section titled “Bug Fixes”Improve index crash recovery
Section titled “Improve index crash recovery”We improved the mechanism to recover the database state after an unclean shutdown.
Use fast_float to parse reals
Section titled “Use fast_float to parse reals”The parser for real values now understands scientific notation, e.g.,
1.23e+42.
Prefer CLI over config file for vast.plugins
Section titled “Prefer CLI over config file for vast.plugins”The command-line options --plugins, --plugin-dirs, and --schema-dirs now
correctly overwrite their corresponding configuration options.
By @dominiklohmann in #2289.
Fix crash in query evaluation for new partitions
Section titled “Fix crash in query evaluation for new partitions”VAST no longer crashes when a query arrives at a newly created active partition in the time window between the partition creation and the first event arriving at the partition.
By @dominiklohmann in #2295.
Respect the default fp-rate setting
Section titled “Respect the default fp-rate setting”VAST now reads the default false-positive rate for sketches correctly. This
broke accidentally with the v2.0 release. The option moved from
vast.catalog-fp-rate to vast.index.default-fp-rate.
By @dominiklohmann in #2325.
Parse time from JSON strings containing numbers
Section titled “Parse time from JSON strings containing numbers”The JSON import now treats time and duration fields correctly for JSON
strings containing a number, i.e., the JSON string "1654735756" now behaves
just like the JSON number 1654735756 and for a time field results in the
value 2022-06-09T00:49:16.000Z.
By @dominiklohmann in #2340.
The index shall not quit on write errors
Section titled “The index shall not quit on write errors”VAST will no longer terminate when it can’t write any more data to disk. Incoming data will still be accepted but discarded. We encourage all users to enable the disk-monitor or compaction features as a proper solution to this problem.
Fall back to string when parsing config options from environment
Section titled “Fall back to string when parsing config options from environment”Setting the environment variable VAST_ENDPOINT to host:port pair no longer
fails on startup with a parse error.
By @dispanser in #2305.
Improve usability of CSV format
Section titled “Improve usability of CSV format”The csv import no longer crashes when the CSV file contains columns not
present in the selected schema. Instead, it imports these columns as strings.
vast export csv now renders enum columns in their string representation
instead of their internal numerical representation.
By @dominiklohmann in #2336.
Allow missing value indices in partition flatbuffer
Section titled “Allow missing value indices in partition flatbuffer”VAST no longer crashes when importing map or pattern data annotated with the
#skip attribute.
Fix occasional shutdown hangs
Section titled “Fix occasional shutdown hangs”VAST no longer hangs when it is shut down while still importing events.
Support environment variables for plugin options
Section titled “Support environment variables for plugin options”VAST no longer ignores environment variables for plugin-specific options. E.g.,
the environment variable VAST_PLUGINS__FOO__BAR now correctly refers to the
bar option of the foo plugin, i.e., plugins.foo.bar.
By @dominiklohmann in #2390.