As a System or Network Administrator, you can wear a lot of hats in your organization and are asked to take on many projects: new Server OS rollouts, bringing a new Datacenter or remote site online, implementing new servers, storage, and network devices due to company growth or a merger, etc.  So when are you supposed to find time to manage and monitor all of these new systems, much less the existing ones?  Ideally these duties are distributed over a number of administrators in an organization, but in most cases there just aren’t enough resources to handle all the work.

It’s a particular pain I know well from my own past as a System Administrator.  Until pretty recently, the majority of the tools available to help administrators monitor and troubleshoot their IT and network
infrastructure were too expensive and hard to implement, or they were specific to a vendor’s product or family of products.  I spent a lot of time jumping from one management console to the next -assuming a console even existed.  The amount of time it took to find out what I needed to know in order to do my job was ridiculous.  Assuming the information even existed, I was usually looking at hours of command-line hell whenever a problem cropped up.

Today’s Log and Event Management solutions help bridge that gap.  By centralizing the log collection from all of your servers, network devices, storage devices, and applications (including vendor-specific monitoring tools), you have a much more centralized view that you can use for managing, monitoring, and troubleshooting your IT and network infrastructure.

These solutions can automatically distinguish critical events from non-critical events and display them in an intuitive graphical dashboard interface so you can easily identify what systems need your attention.  Alarms can be created to automatically let you know when the most critical events are happening, such as servers or devices being shut down, processes being stopped or restarted, disks or storage devices reaching their quota, or even when system configuration changes are made.  They can then be set up to notify your Help Desk Operators during business hours or for certain non-critical events, and notify the System or Network Administrator for events occuring off-hours or for the more critical events.

With an Enterprise Log and Event Management solution you can quickly identify when these events occur, on what systems, and who or what caused them by using the forensic investigation capabilities included with these tools.  Or use the real-time analysis tools for monitoring system messages for troubleshooting purposes or identifying what events are currently occuring.  Reports can be generated so you can understand what’s happening in your environment across a given period of time, identify trends, or use the data for capacity planning.  And it’s all GUI-based and largely automated, so it doesn’t take forever.

From an IT Operations perspective, it’s easy to see how Log and Event Management can provide a number of benefits to a System and Network Administrator.

Believe me, as someone who’s been there before and had to do things the hard way, there are some tools you shouldn’t go without:

1.  A central dashboard to quickly view the health of your environment
2.  Forensic investigation and real-time utilities to quickly identify root cause
3.  Automated notification of critical events
4.  Reporting capabilities for trend analysis or capacity planning.

It sure would’ve helped make my life as a System Administrator easier!