The firewall must generate traffic log entries containing information to establish the source of the events, such as the source IP address at a minimum.

Without establishing the source of the event, it is impossible to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack. In order to compile an accurate risk assessment and provide forensic analysis, security personnel need to know the source of the event. In addition to logging where events occur within the network, the traffic log events must also identify sources of events, such as IP addresses, processes, and node or device names.