Top 4 Advantages of Using Syslog Server

Understanding what is going on in your network environment is crucial to health of your system. Using a syslog server enables you to send event messages and multiple logs from your network devices to a centralized unit. Here we will discuss top 4 advantages of using syslog server in our environment.

This allows you to not only save time searching for events but also the syslog is setup to send alerts to administrators on any anomaly in your network. Nix servers, routers, switches, firewalls, and even apache web servers have been shown to have the ability to send syslog data.

Windows servers are not able to directly log and send system data. However, there are tools that can be used to aid in routing this IIS data to your syslog server.

(Recommended read : Important Logs to monitor to identify issues in the Linux system )

(Also Read : Install ELK stack: Manage logs with Elasticsearch, Logstash & Kibana )

Saving Money

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While saving money seems to be a no brainer, some smaller startups or businesses have a harder time validating the software costs vs the probability of a data breach. With the average cost for a data breach being $7 million and the risks of private information sinking your company; trying out a free syslog server should be on the radar for all businesses.

Reducing Downtime

While inversely related to saving money, downtime can wreak havoc on an already fragile system trying to get its network up and running again.

Troubleshooting and attempting to figure out log data and what actually happened can have a secondary impact on overall productivity of labor and time that should be spent on other areas of the company to make money.

Being proactive and understanding changes in log activity can help reduce any calamities that might happen to your system.

Alerting System

While getting alerts at anytime within a 24 hr period might be quite annoying for the network team, it is one of the most useful monitoring tools available for security, application monitoring, network, and server alerting.

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Network alerting with syslog allows for monitoring and provides updates in areas that other monitoring tools are not able to collect. Security allows for proactively understanding changes within the logs. It provides updates on areas such as location, time, and why the breach occurred.

Server alerts are one of the best applications of the syslog because of the importance of servers in a network. Some companies have many servers in use at any given time which can be difficult to pinpoint offline activity or runtime or configuration issues in the network.

Applications are how we view and run the internet across the web. Any changes to the web application log will provide alerts to actively engage and troubleshoot the problem.

Increasing Productivity

Think about all the devices on a network. Think of attempting to collect all the log files respectively from each device and attempting to combine them into one common file to manage or read. The labor involved to manually combine and search through the millions of log files would be challenging to say the least.

This is where the syslog comes into action. It is able to provide a centralized area for all these files. The developers or system administrators are then able to classify, filter, and manage the files to target the issues or even just monitor the network proactively to keep the network healthy.

Understanding that productivity can change within your own social network can also apply to issues within a PC network. A motivational speaker once discussed how your network of friends can make you more productive and stated, “Change who you spend your life with and your productivity will change.”

This statement can also be applied to network systems. If you allow the same negative issues to mismanage your network then your productivity will falter until you understand to proactively surround yourself with the best software to gather and interpret data to be efficient and the most prepared in your business.

So this was our take on advantages of using Syslog server. If you have your views or any question, you can mention them using the comment box below.