+ Log Management

Compliance, security and IT operations teams increasingly recognize the value and insight that enterprise log data delivers. The ability to effectively and efficiently analyze log data can help organizations contain the rising cost of regulatory compliance audits, enhance their security posture, and gain direct visibility into network, system and application health and availability.

Long-term data retention requirements imposed by regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), PCI, FISMA, HIPAA and GLBA necessitate a cost-effective means to collect and store audit-quality log data. Given the wide variety of log formats and ever-growing volume of logs generated, enterprises need a robust log management infrastructure that can support rapid collection of large log volumes across all locations. Moreover, information has to be easily accessible through an intuitive interface that provides logical navigation across terabytes of log data.

+ Network Monitoring Solutions

The term network monitoring describes the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator (via email, pager or other alarms) in case of outages. It is a subset of the functions involved in network management.

For example, to determine the status of a webserver, monitoring software may periodically send an HTTP request to fetch a page. For email servers, a test message might be sent through SMTP and retrieved by IMAP or POP3.

Commonly measured metrics are response time, availability and uptime, although both consistency and reliability metrics are starting to gain popularity. The widespread addition of WAN optimization devices is having an adverse effect on most network monitoring tools — especially when it comes to measuring accurate end-to-end response time because they limit round trip visibility.

Status request failures – such as when a connection cannot be established, it times-out, or the document or message cannot be retrieved – usually produce an action from the monitoring system. These actions vary — an alarm may be sent (via SMS, email, etc.) to the resident system admin, automatic failover systems may be activated to remove the troubled server from duty until it can be repaired, etc.

+ Security Information And Event Management

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions are a combination of the formerly disparate product categories of SIM (Security Information Management) and SEM (Security Event Management). SIEM technology provides real-time analysis of security alerts generated by network hardware and applications. SIEM solutions come as software, appliances or managed services, and are also used to log security data and generate reports for compliance purposes.