I spent a week learning how Wazuh actually works under the hood : here's what I learned
Source Reddit Cybersecurity
Discussion
This content is a detailed personal exploration and tutorial about the internal workings of Wazuh, an open-source security monitoring platform. It explains the event processing pipeline from log generation to alert visualization, including components like File Integrity Monitoring and Vulnerability Detection. The post does not describe any security vulnerability or threat but rather provides educational insights into Wazuh's architecture and detection mechanisms.
r/cybersecurity (opens in a new tab)u/6f213110 points0 comments
Most Wazuh tutorials focus on installation, but I was more interested in understanding what happens internally after an event occurs on an endpoint.
I set up a small Wazuh lab and traced the complete path of an event:
- Log generation on the endpoint
- Agent collection
- Manager communication
- Decoding and rule matching
- Alert generation
- Indexing in OpenSearch
- Dashboard visualization
I also dug into:
- File Integrity Monitoring (FIM)
- Vulnerability Detection
- Syscollector
- The new CTI platform
- How rules and decoders work together
One thing that surprised me was how much of Wazuh's detection pipeline relies on the combination of decoders and rules rather than "magic" threat detection.
I documented the architecture, log flow, and some hands-on examples here:
https://soumyadahal.com.np/wazuh/
Would love feedback from people running Wazuh in production. Is there anything important about the internal architecture that I missed or misunderstood?