Syslog Monitoring

It is essential to have both active and passive monitoring capabilities in your network management tool. The active monitoring makes for a proactive approach to keeping networks healthy i.e. continuously scanning the network and trying to prevent or minimize the effects of a possible downtime⁄slowdown. With passive monitoring techniques you are also armed with a sound troubleshooting mechanism to analyze any network incidents after they have occurred, despite having tried to prevent them through the proactive approach.

Syslog monitoring is a good passive monitoring mechanism to compliment the continuous, active SNMP monitoring done throughout the network. OpManager provides a rule–based method of reading incoming syslogs and associates alerts to these syslogs to notify required network personnel or perform other tasks e.g. a server⁄port shutdown. OpManager’s Syslog daemon supports a wide number of devices across multiple platforms. It supports any syslog exporting device or applications viz. Servers (Linux, UNIX, AIX and Solaris), routers, switches & etc.. No more do you have to switch between a log monitoring tool and a network management tool - network management through OpManager now also includes syslog monitoring, all in one unified console.

Syslog Monitoring Feature Highlights:

• Receives log messages via UDP
• Auto-splitting of messages to show sender, facility, severity, message
• Easy rule creation to identify required, important syslogs
• Filter on facility name, severity and keyword match⁄ regex
• Assign severities to incoming syslogs and create alarms from these
• Forward OpManager events as Syslogs or received Syslog message to another NMS platform
• Syslog widgets to know instantly about what’s happening in your network
• Know the syslog flow–rate into OpManager at any point of time
• Simplified and customizable reporting based on host, data, severity, Group and by event type.

A huge task before administrators is to maintain lengthy log messages which occupy enormous space. OpManager’s rule–based reading of syslogs allows the administrator to intelligently correlate incoming syslogs and thus do away with time–wasting syslog "noise". Logs help administrators to spot external attacks, analyze their patterns, recognize any breach in internal user access permissions, study system usage trends etc... Seasoned administrators monitor Syslogs and Event Logs to use these for

• Security audits (User Activity, Authentication violations and events, etc.)
• Device and System management (System Events, Device Errors, Kernel Messages, Drive failure, File system, System temperature problems, Network connections etc.)
• Applications and Services performance management (Application or Service availability⁄ Errors⁄ performance degradation, Database Warning, etc.)