Log management is no doubt a critical part of IT security today. While many companies make sure to invest in security solutions like antivirus and firewalls, log management solutions provide real-time data about equipment status, network users, application users and miscellaneous threats that are hard to identify.
With many log management solutions available in the market with different benefits and features, choosing the right one for your company can be challenging. Here are some expert tips on what you should look for when choosing a log management tool.
Visibility
According to an article about Log management from Stackify, visibility is one of the most crucial things to look for in a log management solution. If your solution can quickly detect anything abnormal happening in your system or network environment, then it saves your company time and money in the long run.
The level of visibility that a log management solution offers plays a key role in preventing threats and issues that may impact network and IT infrastructures. Having greater visibility over your systems, applications, servers and network devices across your entire enterprise is key to ensuring smooth operations.
Centralization of Logs
When buying a log management solution, you need to consider centralization at the heart of its functionality. Enterprise tech experts are faced with the mounting challenge of having to manage numerous logs for larger and more complex environments. Centralization ensures you have access to every critical log data in one place so you can conduct root cause analysis and risk assessments more quickly.
Centralization helps reduce the amount of time needed to evaluate the risk of every event. Tech professionals can configure alerts much easier, understand and manage devices better and browse logs from multiple sources at the same time, making it easier to solve problems. Centralized logging is one of the core features you should look for in log management solutions, and is absolutely critical for IT security.
Ease of Use
As with many enterprise tech solutions, you need to consider ease of use when selecting a log management solution. Ease of use specifically plays a huge role in increasing reporting quality, improving the understanding of the product and resolving a problem. Given the ease of access to critical log information, the user base of log management solutions has increased tremendously.
Look for an easy-to-navigate user interface that enables you to get all the information you need as quickly as possible. With that, you can solve problems much faster. Solutions providers are also going an extra step to provide helpful resources and easy-to-learn user guidelines that help you gain knowledge of how to use the software in the most effective way.
Monitoring Requirements
What are you looking to monitor using the log management solution? You cannot invest in log management capabilities without asking yourself this critical question in advance. There is a lot to monitor, so having a well-defined monitoring criteria is important, so you don’t get overwhelmed with all the alerts and logs from your solution.
You need to define what you want to monitor most and how you want the alerts to go. Do an evaluation of your network, determine the target audience you need to monitor and then work with the solution to ensure active threat monitoring, defensive security monitoring and out-of-the-box security posture.
Implementation Process
Before investing in a log management tool, it’s helpful to determine how full implementation will be done. Will the vendor handle the implementation process for you? Do you have an in-house team to do it? Either way, you choose, you need a well-thought-out implementation plan that will ensure that once you invest in the solution, you will get the most out of its capabilities.
Conclusion
The evolving world of IT security is fast changing and demands organizations to have the expertise and infrastructure in place to recognize and combat threats. That’s why monitoring network infrastructures using log management tools is critical in protecting businesses.
