Simple Log Analysis with Runecast

Log Analysis is the process of examining logs and events in a system. This enables IT admins to have insight into what is going on inside their systems, and take the necessary measures to stop any potential problems.

Why should you analyze your logs?

All organizations who want to stay compliant with mandated standards and avoid any security breaches, or data exfiltration, should collect their logs, analyze them and remediate any issues or vulnerabilities they find. Some companies are required to analyze their logs and demonstrate their compliance for security standards such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, NIST, BSI IT-Grundschutz and other regulatory standards. In system and event logs IT admins can track any user behavior anomalies and detect malicious intent or a compromised system. Log analysis is also important in forensic investigation of malware attacks and exfiltration of data. 

Challenges to good analysis

There are many challenges to log analysis and the main one is the sheer amount of data. Organizations generate huge amounts of data, making it difficult to sift through everything and identify what is and is not important. Secondly, Log Analysis can be a very complex and time-consuming process. IT administrators need to spend time analyzing logs one by one, decide on their importance, prioritize accordingly and then remediate the issues. On top of that, this is a continuous process. It is like trying to put out a blazing fire with a glass of water. Lastly, if there are deadlines to meet, or certain regulatory standards, it can be really overwhelming to stay on top of and very costly to prepare for an audit, whether that is in-house or via an outsourced third party.

How Runecast makes it better 

Runecast has automated the process of Log Analysis for you. This saves you time and energy, as Runecast does the hard work for you. The Runecast platform acts as a syslog server collector, gathering all the information in one place and parsing the logs from your ESXi logs and VMs. It filters data based on important keywords such as: FailedTo, SCSI_command, NMP, Unableto, Error, and shell.

The powerful, AI-powered platform continuously monitors the logs it receives and searches for log patterns that are described in various VMware KB articles. The Log KBs Discovered view displays a table of issues discovered in the logs within your specified period of time.

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The results are clearly displayed and grouped according to priority in the dashboard. This enables your teams to know which issues to focus on and why. All the available information about each issue is shown, including how it applies and which security or regulatory standard the information is coming from. And for a large number of issues a custom remediation script can be generated, tailored specifically to your infrastructure. This allows you to quickly and easily see how to go from failing to compliant, and from simply knowing about an issue to resolving it.
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Take your chance and see how Runecast can improve your daily challenges and make your life easier.