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cache

Expert Operator

We designed the cache operator for under-the-hood use of the Tenzir Platform on app.tenzir.com. We generally recommend not using the operator by yourself, but rather relying on the Tenzir Platform to automatically manage caches for you.

An in-memory cache shared between pipelines.

cache id:string, [mode=string, capacity=int, read_timeout=duration, write_timeout=duration]

Description​

The cache operator caches events in an in-memory buffer at a node. Caches must have a user-provided unique ID.

The first pipeline to use a cache writes into the cache. All further pipelines using the same cache will read from the cache instead of executing the operators before the cache operator in the same pipeline.

id: string​

An arbitrary string that uniquely identifies the cache.

mode = string (optional)​

Configures whether the operator is used an input, an output, or a transformation. The following modes are available currently:

  • "read": The operators acts as an input operator reading from a cache that is requires to already exist.
  • "write": The operator acts as an output operator writing into a cache that must not already exist.
  • "readwrite": The operator acts as a transformation passing through events, lazily creating a cache if it does not already exist. If a cache exists, upstream operators will not be run and instead the cache is read.

Defaults to "readwrite".

capacity = int (optional)​

Stores how many events the cache can hold. Caches stop accepting events if the capacity is reached and emit a warning.

Defaults to 4Mi.

read_timeout = duration (optional)​

Defines the maximum inactivity time until the cache is evicted from memory. The timer starts when writing the cache completes (or runs into the capacity limit), and resets whenever the cache is read from.

Defaults to 1min.

write_timeout = duration (optional)​

If set, defines an upper bound for the lifetime of the cache. Unlike the read_timeout option, this does not refresh when the cache is accessed.

Examples​

Cache the results of an expensive query​

export
where @name == "suricata.flow"
summarize total=sum(bytes_toserver), src_ip, dest_ip
cache "some-unique-identifier"

Get high-level statistics about a query​

This calculates the cache again only if the query does not exist anymore, and delete the cache if it's unused for more than a minute.

export
where @name == "suricata.flow"
summarize src_ip, total=sum(bytes_toserver), dest_ip
cache "some-unique-identifier", read_timeout=1min
summarize src_ip, total=sum(total), destinations=count(dest_ip)

Get the same statistics, assuming the cache still exists:

cache "some-unique-identifier", mode="read"
summarize src_ip, total=sum(total), destinations=count(dest_ip)