Zen 2.0

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 data they [...]

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 of [...]

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. [...]

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.

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 operating system or [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.
- A medium size [...]

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 [...]