[logs] Eventlog to syslog

[Rainer Gerhards]

Hi all,

Anton seems to have forgotten the product that invented that technology
and still, in my humble vendor opinion, is leading the pack ;)

Please have a look at EventReporter (http://www.eventreporter.com) for
pure Event Logs or MonitorWare Agent (http://www.mwagent.com) if you
want to monitor all the rest, too (for example files, databases, even
serial devices). These tools are not free, but are rock-solid, extremely
feature-rich and around for over 10 years now.

Back to the tech part: if you think about event log forwarding, there
are a couple of issues you should think about:

- can it process all event logs, including custom logs?
- can it work with the new event log system (e.g. Vista)?
- how large is the memory and CPU footprint?
- can it resolve object names and Active Directory GUIDs?
- can it work on any platform you need?
- what happens to log data during a restart?
- what happens if it needs to wrange with malformed message libraries
  (one of the real joys on a third-party-extensible system ;))
- can it reliably handle everything that comes from a message source?

If you look at files, there are a couple of more questions:
- can IIS log files be correctly processed (they *are* special,
  even if some vendors have yet to find out ;))?
- can it monitor multiple files inside a directory
- how about rollover processing?
- how about UTF-8, MBCS and Unicode in general? 

For both (and potential other sources), you need to ask yourself
questions about the processing:
- is it multithreaded?
- how is a large message burst handled?
- what happens if a destination is down?
- is local pre-processing supported (this is *vitally* important on
Windows)?
- can you reformat the messages?
- is the output format fixed?

A quick rant on the agent vs. Agentless question. I know that agentless
has become popular. I have been a strong opposer of agentless solutions
for long, but marketing has forced me to make our solutions able to work
agentless. They are doing great in agentless mode. But believe me, this
is crap (as with all other agentless solutions too). If you'd like to
have reliable and performant (and network-friendly) event log
processing, forget about agentless mode. Everyone who tells you
agentless is great does not really know what happens when you run over
the network (or doesn't care about performance and reliability at all
;)).

I am sorry that I am a bit short on time (even for a vendor ;)), but I
hope these things get you started. If you'd like to have a look at "the
real thing" ;) you can visit http://www.monitorware.com for more
information and free trial downloads.

As a side-note, you may also want to have a look at rsyslog
(http://www.rsyslog.com), my GPLed extremely feature-rich Linux syslogd.

Rainer

> -----Original Message-----
> From: loganalysis-bounces at loganalysis.org 
> [mailto:loganalysis-bounces at loganalysis.org] On Behalf Of 
> Anton Chuvakin
> Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 8:38 PM
> To: Marcelo de Souza
> Cc: loganalysis at loganalysis.org
> Subject: Re: [logs] Eventlog to syslog
> 
> Snare, Project LASSO (http://sourceforge.net/projects/lassolog), DAD
> (http://sourceforge.net/projects/lassie), ntsyslog (whereve), what
> else is out there?
> 
> On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 4:59 AM, Marcelo de Souza
> <marcelo at marcelosouza.com> wrote:
> > Loganalysis folks,
> >
> >   Which tool do you really recommend for windows eventlog to unix
> >  syslog translation?
> >
> >   I've been thinking about Snare, but I'd like to hear your opinion.
> >
> >   Thanks in advance.
> >
> >  --
> >  Marcelo de Souza
> >  _______________________________________________
> >  LogAnalysis mailing list
> >  LogAnalysis at loganalysis.org
> >  http://www.loganalysis.org/mailman/listinfo/loganalysis
> >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Anton Chuvakin, Ph.D., GCIA, GCIH, GCFA
>       http://www.chuvakin.org
>   http://chuvakin.blogspot.com
>     http://www.info-secure.org
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>