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Sentry-go®
3Ds (UK) Limited
© 2000-2010 |
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Monitoring Event Logs & Log Files |
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Monitoring Event Logs can be a key way of improving your IT solutions by
detecting faults as soon as they're reported. Likewise, by monitoring log files,
you can watch messages written to standard text files by applications that use
their own files to log errors etc.
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On Windows server machines, Windows Event Logs are the central logging mechanism for
the Operating System as well as many of the applications and services that run on it. This
approach is ideally suited to machines where no one is directly logged on (and
therefore cannot respond to standard message-box alerts). However, their main
drawback is that each server has it's own set of logs.
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Event Log monitoring remotely or across a number of machines using the standard tools provided can be extremely
time consuming and is typically only done infrequently throughout the week or
after an error has already been reported by end-users. A better approach is to
monitor Event Logs automatically and be informed immediately an error occurs.
The same can be said for monitoring standard, text-based log files. Although Event Logs are
used by many systems, there are times when applications need or prefer to use their
own text-based log files. For example, applications like Internet Information
Services (IIS) - which records HTTP errors to it's own log file & SQL Server
both use standard log files as well. Often 3rd party or in-house systems will
too.
Despite not being in the Event Log, it is often very important to monitor
these log files so that you're aware of
errors written to them - e.g. to determine web-based errors being
experienced by your customers.
With Sentry-go, monitoring Windows Event Logs and monitoring text-based log
files is easy, and can be done in near
real-time, meaning that you can be informed of errors within seconds of them
being written to the log.
When monitoring Event Logs you can,
for example ...
- Report on entries recorded in the Event Logs
- Scan based on Event ID, source, event type
- Scan based on keywords & phrases
- Exclude entries based on keywords & phrases
When monitoring log files & text files you can,
for example ...
- Report on entries recorded in the given text file
- Scan based on keywords & phrases
- Exclude entries based on keywords & phrases
Examples where monitoring would be of benefit include ...
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- Key Windows servers - for Event Log errors
- SQL Server log files (for database errors)
- IIS Web log files (for HTTP error codes)
- Servers running 3rd party or custom applications
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