In the world of IT, event correlation is a common and often critical practice that company’s need to ensure maximum efficiency and security. In today’s article we take a look at the intricacies and features to look for when starting the search to acquire the appropriate suite of IT event correlation tools and software for your company. While the to be mentioned features are important, it’s equally important to way the pros and cons of every software and ensure its usefulness in your IT department’s structure.

Event correlation software at its core tracks events that occur on your networks and analyze how and why they interact with each other in the way they do. It not only ensures maximum efficiency for your company by catching potential slowdowns before they happen, but it also monitors your network’s security and looks for threats that may be lurking on your network. Not only does IT event correlation software monitor the events from your routers and switches, but it also keeps an eye on the interactions between your applications in real time and use a custom set of rules and filters ensure you and your team miss nothing.

One feature to consider when looking at event correlation software is the ability for the software to notify in you in real time of any incoming threats from events on your network. A solid set of system alerts can make the difference between catching what is initially a minor issue before spread and causing wide spread havoc to your network and company. Data is everywhere, and setting up alerts to keep an eye on them is widely considered a must have.
Another feature that is often considered critical when searching for the best IT event correlation software for your needs, is a term called compression. Essentially. Compression singles out events that continually happen over and over. At its core, it takes out duplicate events and combines them into one so that hundreds of the same event come through as a single alert. For example, if an application connection fails 3,000 times over the course of a day, the alert is pushed through as “application connection failed 3,000 times” instead of receiving 3,000 separate alerts. Not having the ability to find repetitive events and send them through as a single event and notification can really turn into a nuisance.

Ultimately, some form of IT event correlation tools are becoming as common place in IT departments as network monitoring tools or application monitoring software. The simple awareness that IT event correlation gives you will instantly give you peace of mind that your network is being watched around the clock, and limit the amount of man hours spent manually checking on it. When problems are found, conducting a root cause analysis to find how the issue happened and implement ways to prevent it in the future is a great habit to form and the proper event correlation software will help you to do that.
Most of the IT event correlation software in the marketplace today offers some form of trial or free demo that you can download to really get a feel of how usable the software will be for you and your team. Often times it’s a good idea to have some members of your team that will be using the software give it a spin as well to make sure it’s a good fit. While most IT event correlation software are compatible with all operating systems, downloading a demo will ensure that it is and also ensure that it interacts with your other suite of applications and software efficiently and smoothly.