In his article titled Security Information & Event Management Design: Why log filtering is essential for windows domain log sources? Paul Dutot from Defence Logic raises some valid points about agent side filtering which we have been advocating for some time now. Well worth the read!
It's always delighting to hear users recommend NXLog:
NxLog - Such an awesome little free tool that will push windows events to your log aggregator in a variety of formats. Can even read in from files and push contents out
There was a discussion by the community on reddit about Centralized logging with Windows Event Forwarding. Some alternatives were also recommended.
NXLog For The Win - an article that discusses how to set up NXLog with the ELK stack with a final conclusion: So overall, NxLog is amazing. :)
Unfetter Analytic is a reference implementation supported by The MITRE Corporation and the National Security Agency (NSA). This reference implementation uses NXLog to collect Windows events.
A new book was published recently titled Industrial Cybersecurity. This book is a one-step guide to understanding industrial cyber security, its control systems, and its operations. The book recommends NXLog to collect logs from a Windows system in chapter ICS Network Security.
Eric Conrad gave a talk at at DerbyCon7 and mentioned NXLog being a cool solution that can collect Windows Eventlog remotely on Linux via Windows Event Forwarding. Check out the video on Youtube.
You can find really powerfull tools for making a central syslog server in the Open Source world; from the “traditional” Rsyslog + LogAnalyzer setup to the new players like Graylog2.
Finally, we have got the customer awareness to collect all of a system’s logs as a starting point to get more visibility inside his infrastructure.