Centralized Log Management, why is it necessary?

Logs are an important part of every computing system. Processes that are running within a system generate logs. When the system is smaller it will be easy to manage the generated logs. In a small system, usually the logs will be stored in the local disk itself. What if the infrastructure gets bigger? It will be very hard to manage all the logs within multiple systems. This is the point where organizations have to think about a solution for centralized log management. Centralized log management is nothing but an approach to managing huge volumes of log data within an environment like event logs, audit trails, system logs, etc using tools or services.

Now let us talk about some of the advantages of centralized log management,

• Troubleshooting

Storing all of your logs into a centralized repository will help in easy troubleshooting in case of a failure. This improves the productivity of your IT operations and saves tons of time pulling logs from each system in the event of a failure. Similarly, there are chances that you may lose your critical log files along with a system failure if it is stored within the local disk. So with the centralized log management approach you solve these issues.

In Amazon Web Service (AWS), there is a built-in service called CloudWatch which can be used for centralizing the log management approach. Operating System logs can be pushed to CloudWatch for analysis, setting up alarms, etc. You can refer these blogs to setup log management using CloudWatch for windows and Linux operating systems.

• Analysis

Logs generated and stored will not help you much in resolving an issue, especially when you are short of time. Log analysis will help in performing real-time analysis on computer-generated records thereby making sense out of it. There are a number of tools both paid as well as open-source which can be leveraged to perform log analysis and store the logs centrally. To know more about the tools used in log analysis please visit our blog here.

Additionally, you can visit our blog on a comparison between two popular open-source log management tools here and also the implementation of centralized log management using open-source tools here.

• Compliance and SIEM

Centralized log management approach helps in driving the efficiency of your organization by helping in meeting compliance like HIPAA, SOX, PCI DSS etc.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a security cum log management platform that does real-time collection and analysis of data that are pulled from system logs, security logs, which helps the organizations with helpful insights into potential security threats across critical applications by data aggregation and data normalization. To know more about SIEM please visit our blog here.

• Security Audit

A centralized repository for your logs makes the process of security audit faster and easier. It would be much time consuming to check and verify logs from multiple systems. Implementing log management can improve the efficiency of your audit processes.

In fact, centralized log management is an important step towards an efficient IT infrastructure. It is critical for organizations to understand the events happening within there environment for fast remedial actions. Moreover, it gives visibility to easily identify and rectify the faults that occur within the environment.

This Blog has moved from Medium to blogs.tensult.com. All the latest content will be available there. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated.