BI Scorecard
Intelligent Enterprise’s Cindi Howson did a great review of several BI tools in the market. The review series took a close look at features and functions critical in the business intelligence (BI) product evaluation. Cindi used 6 different criteria to evaluate these products.
Most of the criteria Cindi used can translate directly to log analysis.
However, one of the criteria that’s not discussed, and may not be an issue with BI, is the storage and retention. The volume of logs generated by the infrastructure is ENORMOUS. The ability to store and query all these logs is critical and not something that most of the SIM products can do. If the product’s back end cannot handle the storage, it would mean that the retention period has to be shortened. If the logs are not online and ready to be queried, the ability to gather long term intelligence is reduced.
Be sure to evaluate vendor’s ability to store and retain logs, as well as provide the ability to query and report on them.