Analyzing and correlating events on your networks and system infrastructure has long been a chore for company’s IT departments both big and small. A suite of tools is often critical to manage such events, and that all begins with a sufficient event correlation manager. These days, applications dominate the world of software and IT tools alike. With all of these applications, spanning across various platforms, servers and computers, events are happening amongst the application nodes and need monitoring constantly.
One feature and one of the best ways to utilize your event correlation tool is to write filters and rules to single out critical events and set rules that’s track the highest volume of specific events that your network monitors. By finding a tool that takes an emphasis on this feature, you can save your company a ton of money by reducing the large amount of payroll hours that it takes to write these extensive and often complicate set of rules.
Another major feature to consider when looking at event correlation manager tools is one that his highly automated. Algorithms help automate the correlating of events immensely by constantly learning new patterns and seeking out unique identifiers to correlate events and analyze the relationships between them in real time. When searching for outliers and complicated patterns of events, a human alone cannot adequately track and identify what’s important. A good event correlation manager will come ready with algorithm management and make a difference in performance almost right away.
As previously mentioned, applications while useful and dominating in today’s tech landscape, can create a plethora of problems generating events and alerts that can clog up networks and reduce efficiency. Especially with cloud based systems of all kinds becoming more and more commonplace, events are happening all over you network and your staff should not be burdened with keeping an eye on them. Connections generating event data at every minute of the day needs an event correlation manager to keep an eye on them and make sure nothing is amuck. Often times IT directors are spending an inordinate and unnecessary amount of time resolving issues that the proper set of event correlation tools can take care of seamlessly.
Finding an event correlation manager that produces aesthetically nice yet comprehensive reports is a feature you should not overlook. One of the most common tasks you (or someone on your staff) will complete is running reports that display your logs and alert you to potential threats. From IT operations to authentications, change management, endpoint monitoring and most importantly security, having a tool that can easily produce reports is a real game changer. Depending on the industry of your company, compliance requirements often come into effect and reporting is critical to ensure you remain compliant and lose no efficiency as your business expands and navigates the business landscape moving forward.
As with any tool or software you are considering, it’s often a great idea to see if the potential tool or software has a free demo so you can get a feel for the nuances of it. Not only is it good practice from a usability standpoint, but it will also let you see if it is compatible with your other suite of tools, software and applications that you currently use daily to operate your business. When using the demo, also check out the software company’s customer service and support in case you do run into issues down the line that need out of house assistance. While attaining the correct event correlation manager is often critical to IT department’s efficiency, the durability and long term reliability of the tool is equally important.