Any IT professional, from the CIO to a junior system administrator, understands the intrinsic value of knowing what is happening in the enterprise infrastructure. Event logs put out by your hardware, operating systems, applications and network infrastructure provide the basis for that understanding. Logs matter. Standards bodies, training organizations, IT best practices, all call for the auditing of event logs. Analyzing log data provides IT staff with a wealth of critical information about user and administrator activities, system health and performance, and general security concerns.

The cost and complexity of managing logs

Log data, however, is also representative of a conundrum facing IT today --too much data and too little time. Log data is voluminous and the critical information is often hidden in a sea of logs. The manual collection and review of this data is simply overwhelming. Without a means to automate, prioritize and analyze this overwhelming quantity of data it quickly becomes a distraction rather than a benefit.

Products that provide Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Log Management capabilities collect these logs and make them useful. The growth of corporate compliance requirements in the last decade has been the great enabler of SIEM/log management solutions but without a compliance driver many companies cannot justify the purchase of these relatively complex and expensive solutions.

Without the ability to justify the purchase of SIEM products, many IT departments simply have to do the best they can. Too often, however, this ends up being waiting for the phone call from an irate user when a critical service goes down, or realizing that a critical system has been hacked only when confidential company data hits the street.

How EventTracker Pulse helps

EventTracker Pulse enables IT to harness log data without the cost and complexity of full SIEM solutions. EventTracker Pulse is a low cost, easy to install, log collection, alerting and analysis engine. It combines the enterprise class EventTracker collection architecture with powerful alerting and high-speed indexed log search.

EventTracker Pulse is valuable for all IT staff. EventTracker Pulse can be used by departmental and system admins to gain visibility into systems and components that are responsible for, as well as IT security personnel as a security alerting and forensics tool.