Log Monitoring is important to have a holistic view of everything that is happening in your environment. It is the only place where everything is visible from all angles and from all technologies that you have, up to the application.

From an application point of view, you want to be aware of the behavior of your application and of application errors before the users start calling you, this is, if they call you at all. You want to know the time the user spends on the transaction that he executes and the distribution of the transaction performance over time.

From a security point of view, the purpose of a log is to act as a red flag when something bad is happening. Reviewing logs regularly could help identify malicious attacks on your systems. Given the large of amount of log data generated by systems, it is impractical to review these logs manually each day. Log monitoring software takes care of that task by using rules to automate the review of these logs and only point out events that might represent problems or threats.

From an infrastructure point of view, logs deliver the root causes of your problems as most errors are logged by the infrastructure components in your network. System logs, network logs, storage logs and corresponding events deliver you a wealth of information on problems and probable causes. From there most of these errors are documented by the vendors and solutions can be applied.

In general, you need log monitoring to:

• Know about Issues before users call support. You go scrambling for the log file in response to users reporting an error, but log monitoring lets you turn that around — turn it into something proactive.
• Detect suspicious activity before it blows up on you. Log monitoring shows you that someone is trying to break in before they succeed. This gives you the ability to engage in prevention instead of damage control.
• Regulatory Compliance. Where does log monitoring fit in? Most regulations not only require extensive logging but also monitoring of log files to look for certain discrepancies. If you’re in a regulated industry or government, adopting log monitoring now may save you headaches later.
• Baseline System Performance for Future Early Detection. Slowdown can sometimes cost an e-commerce site just as dearly as outages, and log monitoring can help you detect it, even when there’s not an error to be found.
• Look for patterns to help your business. You can use log monitoring to gather intelligence and improve your business as well. Gather your logs in one place, turn them into data, and then monitor them. This will give you a leg up on your competition, and it will make life easier for everyone involved in application development and support.

Effectively analyzing large volumes of diverse logs can pose many challenges, such as:

• Volume: log data can reach hundreds of gigabytes of data per day for a large organization. Simply collecting, centralizing, and storing data at this volume can be challenging.
• Normalization: logs are produced in multiple formats. The process of normalization is designed to provide a common output for analysis from diverse sources.
• Velocity: the speed at which logs are produced from devices can make collection and aggregation difficult.
• Veracity: log events may not be accurate. This is especially problematic from systems that perform detection, such as intrusion detection systems.

Therefore, not only log monitoring is required, but also log management is required to deal with large volumes of computer-generated log messages. Log management includes:

• Log collection
• Centralized log aggregation
• Long-term log storage and retention
• Log rotation
• Log analysis (in real-time and in bulk after storage)
• Log search and reporting

Not everyone’s network and system designs are the same and setting up the rules that will filter the usually vast number of logs generated is very important and often takes some time to get it right. This part of log monitoring is the “art” phase where you modify the settings to get things just right for your environment.

MonitorNow introduces the means to manage your logs from collection to reporting using tools and services to maintain, report and interpret your logs.

We deliver log management on-site or in the cloud and provide you the tools to interpret your logs, analyze the data and report on the items in your log files.

We deliver the log monitoring and management as a service; thus, we are responsible for the installation, configuration and maintenance of the log management, the set-up of the log monitoring tools, the continuous maintenance and support of your log monitoring.

MonitorNow has a clear and well-defined Service Catalogue, with an extensive list of Logfile Pattern Translators for most types of logfiles and uses an extensive library of input plugins.

MonitorNow provides an all-inclusive service, the initial set-up, the configuration of the monitoring environment, all customizations for the customer and the dashboards.

As a partner of Elastic, we use Elastic tools to deliver our services on-site and in the cloud.