ceds-homelab/soc-lab

🧠 SOC Lab – Monitoring, Logging & Security Simulation

🚀 Overview

This SOC Lab is a focused project within my homelab environment designed to simulate real-world monitoring, logging, and basic security detection workflows.

The goal is to replicate how modern infrastructure teams observe system behavior, detect anomalies, and maintain service reliability.

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🖥️ Infrastructure Backbone

• Proxmox VE (virtualization platform)
• Virtual Machines and LXC containers
• Segmented network environment (VLANs)

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☸️ Kubernetes Environment

• 12-node K3s cluster (Raspberry Pi)

• Control plane + worker node architecture

• Workload segmentation:

  • ingress
  • data
  • monitoring

kubectl get nodes -o wide
kubectl get pods -A

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🌐 Traffic & Service Routing

• Nginx Proxy Manager (reverse proxy)
• Cloudflare Tunnel (secure external access)
• Subdomain-based service exposure

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📊 Monitoring & Observability

• Prometheus (metrics collection)
• Grafana (dashboard visualization)
• Uptime Kuma (service monitoring)

Key Capabilities:

• System performance tracking
• Service uptime monitoring
• Infrastructure visibility

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🔐 Security Layer (In Progress)

• CrowdSec (intrusion detection & prevention)
• Basic firewall and access control concepts
• Monitoring suspicious traffic patterns

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📜 Logging Pipeline (Planned)

• Grafana Loki (log aggregation)
• Centralized log visibility
• Correlation between logs and system activity

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⚔️ Attack Simulation (Planned)

To validate monitoring and logging systems, the following simulations are planned:

• Network scanning (nmap)
• Failed authentication attempts
• Traffic pattern analysis

nmap -A <target-ip>

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🧪 Skills Demonstrated

• Infrastructure design and deployment
• Kubernetes cluster management
• Monitoring and observability implementation
• Reverse proxy and traffic routing
• System-level thinking and troubleshooting

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🎯 Future Enhancements

• Full logging pipeline (Loki integration)
• Alerting (Grafana alerts)
• Security event tracking
• Automated deployments (CI/CD)

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💡 Key Takeaway

This lab demonstrates the ability to design, build, and operate a distributed system with monitoring and observability, reflecting real-world infrastructure and platform engineering practices.