---
title: Decode CEF
description: The decode_cef processor decodes Common Event Format (CEF) messages. It follows the specification defined in  Micro Focus Security ArcSight Common Event...
url: https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/2659/reference/beats/filebeat/processor-decode-cef
products:
  - Beats
  - Filebeat
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless: Generally available
  - Elastic Stack: Generally available
---

# Decode CEF
The `decode_cef` processor decodes Common Event Format (CEF) messages. It follows the specification defined in [ *Micro Focus Security ArcSight Common Event Format, Version 25*](https://archive.org/download/commoneventformatv25/CommonEventFormatV25.pdf). This processor is available in Filebeat. This is an example CEF message.
`CEF:0|SomeVendor|TheProduct|1.0|100|connection to malware C2 successfully stopped|10|src=192.0.2.10 dst=203.0.113.2 spt=31224`
Any content that precedes `CEF:` is ignored. This allows the processor to directly parse CEF content from messages that contain syslog headers.
Below is an example configuration that decodes the `message` field as CEF after renaming it to `event.original`. It is best to rename `message` to `event.original` because the decoded CEF data contains its own `message` field.
```yaml
processors:
  - rename:
      fields:
        - {from: "message", to: "event.original"}
  - decode_cef:
      field: event.original
```

The `decode_cef` processor has the following configuration settings.

| Name                  | Required | Default | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                 |     |
|-----------------------|----------|---------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|-----|
| `field`               | no       | message | Source field containing the CEF message to be parsed.                                                                                                                                                       |     |
| `target_field`        | no       | cef     | Target field where the parsed CEF object will be written.                                                                                                                                                   |     |
| `ecs`                 | no       | true    | Generate Elastic Common Schema (ECS) fields from the CEF data. Certain CEF header and extension values will be used to populate ECS fields.                                                                 |     |
| `timezone`            | no       | UTC     | IANA time zone name (e.g. `America/New_York`) or fixed time offset (e.g. `+0200`) to use when parsing times that do not contain a time zone. `Local` may be specified to use the machine’s local time zone. |     |
| `ignore_missing`      | no       | false   | Ignore errors when the source field is missing.                                                                                                                                                             |     |
| `ignore_failure`      | no       | false   | Ignore failures when the source field does not contain a CEF message.                                                                                                                                       |     |
| `ignore_empty_values` | no       | false   | Ignore CEF extensions with empty values (e.g. `spt= type=1`)                                                                                                                                                |     |
| `id`                  | no       |         | An identifier for this processor instance. Useful for debugging.                                                                                                                                            |     |