Wazuh: The Open-Source XDR and SIEM Security Platform

TL;DR

• Wazuh is a free and open-source security platform for threat prevention, detection, and response, providing unified XDR and SIEM capabilities across on-premises, virtualized, containerized, and cloud workloads.
• It pairs a lightweight endpoint agent with a central management server that collects, correlates, and analyzes the data the agents gather.
• Core capabilities include intrusion detection, log data analysis, file integrity monitoring, vulnerability detection, configuration assessment, incident response, and regulatory compliance reporting.
• Wazuh integrates with the Elastic Stack and ships the Wazuh WUI for searching alerts and visualizing security events.
• The latest release is v4.14.5, licensed under GPL-2.0, with a stack built mainly in C/C++ and Python.

A note on this page: Wazuh is an independent open-source project developed by Wazuh, Inc. (github.com/wazuh). It is NOT built, owned, or maintained by Navanem. This article is an editorial spotlight published by navanem to highlight an open-source tool we find worth knowing about. All credit for the software belongs to its authors at Wazuh, Inc., and the project builds on the OSSEC project started by Daniel Cid.

What is Wazuh?

Wazuh is a free and open-source platform used for threat prevention, detection, and response, capable of protecting workloads across on-premises, virtualized, containerized, and cloud-based environments. The solution consists of an endpoint security agent deployed to monitored systems and a management server that collects and analyzes the data the agents gather. Wazuh is fully integrated with the Elastic Stack, providing a search engine and data visualization layer so users can navigate their security alerts. The project builds on the OSSEC project originally started by Daniel Cid.

What does the platform do?

Wazuh covers a broad set of XDR and SIEM use cases. For intrusion detection, agents scan systems for malware, rootkits, and anomalies such as hidden files, cloaked processes, or unregistered network listeners, while the server uses a signature-based, regular-expression engine to analyze logs for indicators of compromise. Log data analysis reads operating system and application logs and forwards them securely to the manager for rule-based analysis and storage, with syslog support for agentless devices. The rules surface application errors, misconfigurations, attempted or successful malicious activity, and policy violations.

What about file integrity and vulnerabilities?

File integrity monitoring watches the file system for changes in content, permissions, ownership, and attributes, natively identifying the users and applications that create or modify files. Combined with threat intelligence, this helps spot compromised hosts, and it supports compliance standards such as PCI DSS that require it. For vulnerability detection, agents pull software inventory data that the server correlates against continuously updated CVE databases to identify known-vulnerable software. Configuration assessment runs periodic scans against security policies and hardening guides, returning alerts with remediation recommendations, references, and regulatory compliance mappings.

How does it handle response, cloud, and containers?

Wazuh agents provide out-of-the-box active responses to perform countermeasures against active threats, such as blocking a system from the threat source when criteria are met, and can run commands or queries remotely to support live forensics and incident response. For cloud security, integration modules pull data from providers including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud at the API level, with rules to assess cloud configuration. For container security, the agent integrates natively with the Docker engine to monitor images, volumes, network settings, and running containers, alerting on privileged containers, shells inside containers, and changes to persistent volumes or images.

How does it help with compliance?

Wazuh provides several security controls that help organizations meet industry standards and regulations. According to the project, Wazuh is widely used by payment processing companies and financial institutions to meet PCI DSS requirements, and its web user interface provides reports and dashboards that can help with that and other regulations such as GPG13 and GDPR. The Wazuh WUI offers dedicated views for security events, integrity monitoring, vulnerability detection, and regulatory compliance.

How is it deployed?

Wazuh is deployed as lightweight, multi-platform agents on the systems you want to monitor, reporting to a central management server that performs collection and analysis. The Wazuh team maintains automation and orchestration tooling for standing up the components, including Docker containers, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Salt, Kubernetes manifests, and an AWS CloudFormation template. The official installation guide and full documentation live at documentation.wazuh.com.

How does it scale?

The agent is intentionally lightweight and multi-platform, which keeps overhead low on monitored hosts and makes it practical to roll out across large, mixed fleets spanning on-premises servers, virtual machines, cloud instances, and containers. Heavy lifting such as log correlation, rule matching, and CVE correlation happens on the management server rather than the endpoint. Wazuh notes that this scalability, with multi-platform support, helps organizations meet technical compliance requirements across diverse environments.

Who is it for?

Wazuh suits security teams that want an open-source, unified XDR and SIEM platform, especially those protecting heterogeneous estates that mix on-premises, virtualized, containerized, and cloud workloads. It fits teams that need intrusion detection, file integrity monitoring, vulnerability detection, and log analysis in one stack. It is particularly relevant to payment processors and financial institutions working toward PCI DSS, and to any team needing dashboards and reports for regulations such as GDPR or GPG13.

FAQ

Is Wazuh free and open source?

Yes. Wazuh describes itself as a free and open-source platform, and the source code in this repository is released under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPL-2.0), as stated in the project's LICENSE file.

What is the difference between the Wazuh agent and the server?

The agent is a lightweight component deployed to each monitored system, where it collects data such as logs, file changes, and software inventory. The management server receives that data and performs the analysis, rule matching, CVE correlation, and storage. The server can also ingest data via syslog from devices where no agent is installed.

Does Wazuh integrate with the Elastic Stack?

Yes. Per the project, Wazuh is fully integrated with the Elastic Stack, which provides a search engine and data visualization tool for navigating security alerts. The Wazuh WUI offers dashboards for security events, integrity monitoring, vulnerability detection, and compliance.

Can Wazuh help with PCI DSS compliance?

Wazuh provides security controls such as file integrity monitoring, log analysis, and configuration assessment that map to compliance requirements. The project states it is widely used by payment processing companies and financial institutions to help meet PCI DSS, and its UI provides relevant reports and dashboards. It supports, but does not by itself guarantee, compliance.

Is Wazuh made by Navanem?

No. Wazuh is an independent open-source project developed by Wazuh, Inc. (github.com/wazuh). Navanem did not build it and is not affiliated with it. This page is simply an editorial spotlight by navanem highlighting the project.