Logs are a powerful source of information, as it contains records of every action that’s done on your network. In fact, when used well, logs can provide rich insights into your network performance, usage and management. In addition, this analysis is sure to help you make the right decisions in important areas like security.
That said, it’s not easy to read logs as they come from different devices in different formats. Reading through this information to identify and solve problems can take days, during which time, the vulnerabilities in your network continue to go undetected. Also, such manual analysis opens the room for misinterpretations and mishandling.
To avoid these problems, event log analysis software is essential. These specialized tools collect information from different devices and analyze the same to give you meaningful insights and actionable data. As a bonus, it makes IT administrators more efficient and productive as they can focus on the output data instead of sifting through mounds of raw and unreadable log data.
Now that we understand the importance of log analysis software. Let’s review the best ones in the market today.
Top Event Log Analysis/Analyzer Tools:
Solarwinds Log & Event Manager
Solarwinds Log & Event Manager software collects information from different devices, centralizes it all into a single log, and correlates this data to give important details such as event name, date of occurrence and severity.
A salient feature of this software is it doesn’t just analyze the logs, but also learns from past events to alert you before a breach occurs. Such a proactive approach is sure to save many data breaches.
Other features include:
- Improves security and compliance with good reporting
- Detects suspicious activities and provides automated responses
- Comes with advanced security measures such as LEM, SSO, Smart card integration and more
- Correlates events and reports them in real-time
- Offers remediation in real-time
- Monitors file integrity
- Comes with USB monitoring
- Offers security against external and internal threats
- Easy-to-use interface
- Centralized logs make it easy to troubleshoot
- Provides alerts about suspicious activities in the threat intelligence feed
- Supports more than 1,200 devices, applications and systems
Price:
Free Day Trial, See Official Site for pricing
Official Download:
https://www.solarwinds.com/log-event-manager-software
ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer
ManageEngine EventLog Analyzer collects data from different sources and stores them in a centralized repository. This archived data is time-stamped and hashed to ensure that logs are not tampered.
Its features include
- Enables log import from remote host through HTTPS or FTP
- Provides compliance with different regulatory bodies such as HIPAA
- Allows users to create flexible reports based on different criteria
- It works seamlessly with 700+ devices from more than 30 vendors
- Comes with an icon-based graphic dashboard
- Comes with a PostgreSQL by default, but users can also choose MySQL or MS SQL
- Collects data from agent and agentless data sources
- Intimates address threats with 70 out-of-the-box event correlation rules
- Comes with advanced features such as privileged user monitoring, file integrity monitoring, real-time event correlation and more
- Gives the option to search through logs to get specific information
EventLog Analyzer comes in three editions- free, premium and distributed. The free version supports up to five log sources, premium version supports ten to 100 log sources and distributed supports an unlimited number of log sources. The premium is priced at $599 while the distributed version costs $2,495.
You can download the free version here.
Price:
Get Quote from Official Website below
Official Download:
https://www.manageengine.com/products/eventlog/
InsightOps
InsightOps is a cloud-based log analysis and monitoring tool that collects and correlates log data from different devices for quick analysis and deep insights. This software-as-a-service (SaaS) product makes log data accessible and useful to different departments within an enterprise.
It comes with a host of features aimed to deliver valuable log insights in today’s distributed environment. Some of its salient features are:
- Works in any data format – starting from JSON to plain text
- Organizes all the logs in a central location
- Comes with advanced search features that allows users to search log data based on keywords, key value pairs or regex patterns.
- Gives the option to create custom tags for easy identification of important events
- Streams live application logs and metrics for real-time analysis
- Storage and reporting designed to meet compliance requirements
- Accepts data from any environment and in any format
- SQL-Like Query Language (LEQL) performs advanced calculations like average, sum, min, max, percentile and more.
- Offers data visualization for better analytics
- Graphical dashboards come with histograms, pie charts, multi-line charts and more for easy understanding of analytics
- Provides a wide range of alerts such as pattern-based alerts, inactivity alerts, anomaly detection and team-wide notifications
- Comes with robust APIs to get more out of the platform
- Integrates well with existing tools such as Slack, OpsGenie and iPhone app.
InsightOps has five plans – free, starter, pro, team and enterprise. The starter plan starts at $39 a month, pro at $99 and team at $265 a month respectively. The enterprise option is tailored to meet the needs of every business.
Price:
Get Price Quote from Site below
Official Download:
https://www.rapid7.com/info/logentries-insightops
LOGalyze
LOGalyze is an open-source log analysis and parsing software that offers support for UNIX, Linux, Windows and other operating systems. This software collects data, parses it to identify host, severity and type, and stores them in repositories. It analyzes this data and provides alerts and compliance reports.
The important features of LOGalyze are:
- Creates multi-dimensional statistics that give deep insights into events
- It is open-source, free and is supported by a large community
- Parses every log with default or custom definitions
- Allows users to browse or search through logs using a GUI
- Comes with an options to securely transport logs to syslog devices
- Alerts users when any event matches the assigned criteria.
- Compatible with syslog, rsyslog, syslog-ng and Snare
- Integrated with the AHR ticketing system to better manage your incident reporting
- Generates reports to comply with different regulatory bodies such as HIPAA, PCI DSS and PSZAF-HPT
- Offers real-time correlation and out-of-the-box correlation rules.
Price:
Get Quote from Official Site
Official Download:
http://www.logalyze.com/downloads
Splunk
Splunk is a big name in the world of log management. Its log analysis software collects, stores, indexes, visualizes, analyzes and reports data generated from any machine and in any format.
Some of its important features are:
- Indexes data regardless of format or location.
- Applies structure and schema only at search time, so users can analyze data without any limitation
- Uses the proprietary Splunk Search Processing Language for search queries
- Gives the option to zoom in and out of timelines within a rolling time window
- Provides more than 140 commands to perform searches, calculate metrics and look for specific criteria.
- Makes it easy to correlate events and activities based on time, location or search results.
- Comes with a unique Pivot interface that makes it easy to discover and share insights.
- Custom reports and dashboards make it convenient to get a visual feel
- Helps to create real-time alerts, so automatic trigger notifications can be sent through email.
- Users can access Splunk’s software through any web-based browser.
- Easy setup and data onboarding
Splunk comes in three plans. Splunk Light is ideal for a small IT environment and is priced at $75 per month. Splunk Cloud is a cloud-based service that starts at $90 per month while Splunk Enterprise is a complete solution for large enterprises and the price depends on the amount of data you send to the platform. Both Splunk Cloud and Splunk Light have a free trial period.
Price:
Get Quote from Official Website
Official Download:
https://www.splunk.com/en_us/products.html
Conclusion
To conclude, event log analyzers are an essential tool given the ever-growing array of devices that are plugged into any network today. These log analyzer software collate data from different sources and convert them into a format that is readable and searchable, so you can monitor events within your network.
We have listed some of the best products that we like. Let us know which of these is your favorite in the comments section.
