Overcoming the Domain Controller Log Nightmare
Domain controllers are the central hub of the entire enterprise. All the most critical event log activity is generated and stored on these critical servers. across the enterprise. This includes all domain activity and privileged user activity. One of the major problems is that, millions of events get generated daily on busy domain controllers. Reviewing millions of event logs on a daily basis isn’t realistic for security administrators to accomplish. Privileged insiders make critical changes to the domain infrastructure. These employees need to be monitored to ensure they are following security compliance protocols.
These critical logs have to be collected, monitored, and archived for several years to meet compliance requirements. They also need to be maintained as supporting evidence to prosecute perpetrators who commit damaging acts against the organization. Unfortunately, standard log retention settings on domain controllers cause the event logs to get overwritten, on average, every three hours. All of the valuable event activity data gets erased and can never be retrieved without an intelligent log management solution like LogClarity®.
The LogClarity® Domain Controller Edition is designed specifically to handle these unique problems. LogClarity® automatically deciphers and translates all event log data that is generated on domain controllers and filters out the redundant, misleading, erroneous log data without any user intervention. LogClarity® does this utilizing advanced log analysis technology.
Manual means of collection and archiving techniques are just not reasonable to expect for even the smallest organization. This is true because there are conceivably millions of logs generated daily just on a few domain controllers within every Windows domain. The volume of log data can be intimidating and overwhelming. The good news is that the amount of logs generated is not a realistic representation for the real activity. There are hundreds of thousands of redundant, duplicate and partial event logs that get created which convolute log retention. This can also confuse and overwhelm security administrators trying to decipher the data. Fortunately, the real events that take place are far fewer than what the event logs appear to provide.
Compliance mandates require that organizations retain event logs for up to seven years. PCI Compliance is only for one year. If typical domain controllers are overwriting their logs every few hours, how can organizations meet compliance mandates like PCI?
The LogClarity® Domain Controller Edition is the most comprehensive intelligent log management, event log filtering, and collection solution available today. LogClarity® is the only log management solution that performs analysis of the Windows event logs and intelligently filters and correlates events. This is necessary to overcome the lack of consistent formatting that exists on Windows. By using this approach, an entirely new level of log management is achieved. LogClarity® has the ability to remove the redundant and duplicate logs without losing any real data in the process.
The secret of LogClarity® is the LogClarity® Design Framework (LCDF). The LCDF was designed with the “Analyze First” principle in mind. LogClarity® is the only solution that understands and overcomes the deficiencies of the Windows auditing system all automatically!
Other solution providers don’t talk about the special handling that is required to gain accurate information from the Windows event logs. LogClarity® is the only solution that removes the log ambiguity and addresses the underlying issues directly at the source.
Next >> Understanding and Correlating Windows Events
