Nari Kannan: Why is Business Reporting So frustrating?

| Posted in General Techologies

Nari Kannan from Ajira Technologies has written an interesting piece on the frustration of business users when it comes to reporting. I can’t agree more and I think the operational users share the same frustrations. First, in order to extract value out of the log ocean requires the operational users to find out whether the [...]

More...
October 11th, 2004 | Jian Zhen | No Comments

SOX Summary

One of the most talked about regulations these days is obviously Sarbanes-Oxley. Below is a quick summary of Section 302 and 404. Remember, if you are a CEO or CFO, don’t screw up. Otherwise you will be fined up to $1 million and/or up to 10 years in jail. Section 302 Proper documentation and disclosure [...]

More...
October 10th, 2004 | Jian Zhen | 1 Comment

BI Scorecard

| Posted in General Techologies

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. [...]

More...
October 7th, 2004 | Jian Zhen | No Comments

74% of insider abusers were identified through logs

| Posted in General Techologies

According to the Insider Abuse Study performed by U.S. Secret Service and Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute’s CERT® Coordination Center (CERT/CC), In 74% of the cases, after detection, the insiders’ identities were obtained using system logs.

More...
October 6th, 2004 | Jian Zhen | No Comments

Windows Event Collection

| Posted in General Techologies

Microsoft Windows maintains atleast three event logs: – Security Log – Tracks events such as logon, logoff, change to access rights, and system startup and shutdown. – Application Log – Records events logged by applications, such as the failure of MS SQL to access a database. – System Log – Records events logged by the [...]

More...
October 5th, 2004 | Jian Zhen | 3 Comments

BAM vs BI, Real-time vs Historical Analysis

| Posted in General Techologies

BAM, or Business Activity Monitoring, is an emerging technology (can you call it emerging if it’s already 2-3 years old?) defines the capability of monitoring and reporting, in real-time, all business events. For example, deploying a BAM solution can help a bank monitor, in real-time, the transactions that are going through the system and reporting [...]

More...
October 4th, 2004 | Jian Zhen | No Comments

Why aren’t we looking at logs?

| Posted in General Techologies

Most of the logs generated in a corporate infrastructure are not reviewed. They are either archived and never looked at, or worse, never even retrieved and archived. Much of the logs generated by devices and applications evaporate into the ether and not missed. There are many reasons why most of these logs and events are [...]

More...
October 3rd, 2004 | Jian Zhen | No Comments

Why Log Matters (#2)

| Posted in General Techologies

These days, any large corporate infrastructure can generate tens of thousands of events/logs per second: – A single PIX firewall in a moderately busy environment, with DEBUG level logging turned on, can generate one to two thousands logs per second. – A single high traffic web server will handle hundreds of connections per second. – [...]

More...
October 2nd, 2004 | Jian Zhen | No Comments

Why Log Matters

| Posted in General Techologies

Over the past year I have attempted to create a blog several times but have failed. The main problem being that there was a lack of focus on the topic. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about. Recently, I have been doing some research on the log management/SIM/SEM space and have found very [...]

More...
October 1st, 2004 | Jian Zhen | No Comments