Below is the list of blog posts with the “Centralized logging” tag.

Centralized log management is the practice of collecting logs from across an environment, including applications, servers, containers, networks, and cloud services, and storing them in a single location where they can be searched and analyzed. For operations and security teams, centralized logging is now a core requirement. Without it, logs are scattered across hosts, ephemeral containers, cloud consoles, and disconnected tools. This fragmentation slows troubleshooting, complicates incident response, and limits visibility during security investigations.

People think about logs as one of the biggest chores in the IT industry. Well, that does not necessarily need to be true. If you adhere to some fundamental log management best practices, the value you could get out of them quickly outweighs the effort put into managing them. Logs can easily become the best friend of IT teams looking to keep their systems secure, meet compliance requirements, and maintain a smoothly running network.

One of the challenges that security-conscious Windows administrators face is collecting and centralizing Windows event logs. One of the obvious solutions that come to mind is the native Windows Event Forwarding (WEF) feature available on all modern Windows operating systems. WEF offers the convenience of forwarding Windows events to a central event collector without installing and managing agents. To objectively portray the role this valuable technology plays in the larger scope of enterprise log collection, we have written several articles that discuss it:

It was late March 2021 when a phishing email was sent to a network administrator of TTEC Healthcare Solutions, Inc. (TTEC HS) - an integrated healthcare CX solutions provider - and a threat actor gained highly privileged access to the network. On September 12, 2021, a common ransomware scenario was triggered, with approximately 1,800 devices compromised via the access channel obtained almost 5 months earlier. Prior to executing the ransomware attack, the threat actor successfully exfiltrated data from the TTEC HS network, containing non-public information (NPI) of current and former employees of TTEC HS, and for individuals who were insured by one of TTEC HS’s clients, including, importantly, some New York residents.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month has come and gone again. October marks that festive time of year when companies circulate their mandatory think pieces, remind their employees of the dangers of clicking questionable links, and pat themselves on the back and call it a day. Here’s your friendly November reminder to keep your wits about you year-round. A (brief) history of Cybersecurity Awareness Month The Cybersecurity Awareness Month story began as a partnership between an American governmental agency—​the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA)--and the National Cyber Security Alliance non-profit.

Logs are a record of the internal workings of a system. Nowadays, organizations can have hundreds and, more regularly, thousands of managed computers, servers, mobile devices, and applications; even refrigerators are generating logs in this Internet of Things era. The result is the production of terabytes of log data—​event logs, network flow logs, and application logs, to name a few—​that must be carefully sorted, analyzed, and stored. Without a log management tool, you would need to manually search through many directories of log files on each system to access and extract meaning from these millions of event logs.

The value of log aggregation There is no denying the importance of log aggregation for multi-million-dollar enterprises worldwide. But just what is log aggregation? And how can it help your organization? Well, log aggregation is the process of standardizing and consolidating your log data from distributed systems across your network into one centralized server. By doing so, you have a unified view of what occurs across your entire IT infrastructure.

IT security should be one of the main focus points of all enterprises. In today’s world, when digital transformation is taking place at an unprecedented pace, securing online data is vital for all kinds of businesses. This is why most companies are utilizing SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions that help them identify threats before they can do any harm. Even though SIEM tools are perfect for event correlation and analytics, it is not part of their core functionality to manage log collection, filtering, distribution, and formatting.

Windows Event Forwarding (WEF) provides log centralization capabilities that are natively supported in Windows-based systems. It is straightforward to set up since it is already built into Windows, and only a few pre-requisites are required, such as having a dedicated event server with a group policy object (GPO). Despite its ease of use and native support, WEF has some limitations. This post covers the advantages of using Windows Event Forwarding for centralized log collection, followed by limitations of WEF and its subsequent solutions.