it event correlation and analysis
When it comes to being alerted in real-time to possible incoming threats to both security and performance, having the right suite of IT event correlation and analysis tools can make all the difference in the world and potentially save your company immensely. In today’s feature, we take a look at some things to look at and be aware of when searching for the best IT event correlation and analysis solution for your company’s immediate needs and plan for growth.
Before diving into the best solutions, let us first take a look at what event correlation truly is and the analysis that goes with it. At it’s core, event correlation is the tying together of a certain pattern of events on you network or across multiple networks and finding the associated correlation between them. Often times, event correlation tools are used as a security measure as they can often notify you when a certain known dangerous pattern of events on your network is taking place so you can take stems to neutralize the threat immediately. Once your event correlation tool is off and running regularly, you can then also analyze your daily logs to look for areas of inefficiency which you can then work with your team on finding solutions to fix.
Weather it be error messages, security warnings or just general user information, events on your IT infrastructure range from the hundreds to thousands and are simply too much to manually track and analyze. On top of that, when a malicious event does happen on your network it can trigger a chain of events that can be crippling to your entire company’s operations and worse yet, bottom line. While more traditional software such network management software can track these events they often do so in an old school, clunky and annoying way by alerting you many times for the exact same event. A strong IT event correlation and analysis tool not only locates and pinpoints that event to alert you in real time, but also runs a root cause analysis on the incident to understand how it happen and how to prevent it in the future. A strong IT event correlation and analysis tool also completely automates the managing of events, the correlation they have amongst themselves, and notifies you and your team instantly of any potential issues that arise throughout the day.
Let’s say as an example your company’s main wireless printer/copier goes down. The hundreds of employee computers that use that printer/copier will receive error events simultaneously, which are passed over your network. Your IT team, will then manually go in and look at the events to see what happened and ultimately fix it, spending potentially hours on the single, seemingly harmless event of a printer crashing. An IT event correlation and analysis tool can automatically detect the event, establish a root cause, and produce a report for you (or your IT team) about the issue in great detail. Beyond simple error messages, IT event correlation and analysis tools should also be able to aggregate, correlate and ultimately filter all of the thousands of events on your network that are happening every hour. Without a doubt, a strong IT event correlation and analysis tool should completely automate this process after your initial setup.
As with all software or network tools you are considering this day and age, it’s important to see if you can find a trial demo version of it to try and get feel of it before purchase. It might also be a good idea to let your team play with the demo software a bit, just to see if its something that will make for an easy transition to any software already in place.