Systems in your network are constantly logging information. They’re tracking what’s working and what isn’t, as well as examining trends that could help you to see whether impending problems are coming your way. Simply allowing logs to take up space on your disks without making the most of them could mean that you’re missing out on endless opportunities to grow your company and protect yourself from disaster. However, if you can maintain a regular practice of keeping and managing your log data correctly, then you can make better decisions about your organization, monitor various events in a single place, and constantly improve system performance.
The Benefits of Centralizing Your Event Data
Ultimately, there are two ways to manage and monitor your event logs. Either you can go through the information collected by individual files and applications manually, checking for issues on a one-by-one basis, or you can automate the process. By monitoring logs automatically, you can benefit from everything from more time-efficient process to centralized log data that’s easier to handle.
Although there are some small companies that can cope with manual log management, the larger your network and system becomes, the more difficult it is to monitor your event logs manually. Log monitoring software like Papertrail automates the process of moving crucial information into a singular network. When you keep all of your logs in the same place, you can more quickly search through information for trends and crucial data. There’s even the option to set custom sets of rules that allow you to choose how logs are parsed and processed. This process not only saves you a lot of time, but it helps to improve system performance too. When logs are spread across dozens or hundreds of systems at once, it’s much harder to manage everything in a way that allows you to cultivate dispersed pieces of data into valuable and actionable insights.
Learn from the Past to Improve the Future
The software that you use to monitor and manage your event logs will provide you with an excellent data source through which you can analyze and understand system behavior. You can keep all past event logs in a single place and use what you learn from that information to diagnose and predict future vulnerabilities. For instance, many companies use archived event logs to understand which processes tend to create the most performance issues with waste and bottlenecks.
When you know which problems are holding your company back, it’s much easier to detect minor issues, fix problems, and improve performance. You can even monitor certain logs in real-time so that minor problems aren’t allowed to expand and become something more severe. Since many tools come with the option to customize the way that you monitor your information, it’s easy to create a system that works best for your infrastructure and business. If your company hasn’t tapped into the benefits of log management yet, then now might be the perfect time to discover what an automated system could do for you.
