All events, big or small, on your Windows devices leave traces, which are referred to as event logs: a detailed history of every intricate detail that happens in your system. Whether it's a failed login attempt, a software crash, or a successful system update, everything gets logged here. This treasure trove of information is invaluable for troubleshooting problems and keeping your computers healthy.
Each event comes with a timestamp, source, type of fault, and unique ID. This detailed picture helps you pinpoint the exact cause of any issue or track your system's overall performance. Think of Windows Event Viewer as a powerful magnifying glass that lets you explore these event logs. By analyzing the information they hold, you can easily get to the root of an issue and ensure its smooth operation in the infrastructure. In short, event logs aid in maintaining a healthy, secure Windows system.
Prevention is better than cure when it comes to network monitoring and management. In this era of a rapidly evolving technological landscape where hacking is commonplace, it is crucial to be a proactive network administrator and ward off security intrusions. Securing network information, ensuring data integrity, and assuring 100% uptime are vital for business continuity. Selecting a unified monitoring tool is more advantageous than juggling between multiple tools for various monitoring purposes as it reduces complexity and minimizes stress. Let's explore two scenarios:
Making regular backups of your network data is the initial phase in disaster recovery planning. Suppose you rely on an application to perform these backups for you. Ensuring the seamless execution of backups is paramount, particularly in environments where critical customer data is stored. You need little imagination to say what will happen if the backup fails and you end up finding out only the next morning.
The objective of enabling a firewall for security goes out the window when the firewall service goes down or is unwilling to start and you discover hours later. Of all things, no administrator wants to fail in safeguarding the network. A quick warning over an SMS message, email, or pop-up on your machine for the ISA Server firewall failure will save a lot of time. Monitoring specific event logs, like those with event ID 11000, will solve this problem.
An event log is the first call for help! Naturally, as an administrator, the responsibility of watching out for calls for help lies with you, and you need to choose and put in place a proper solution to track important events. Both of the situations above could have been avoided or at least mended in time by monitoring for event IDs 57751 and 34113 for backup failures.
Though Event Viewer gives an exhaustive account of events, the problem is the lack of a centralized view of these events across machines. Moreover, a huge number of event logs are for information events and can be conveniently ignored. Automating the monitoring of important event logs is the next logical step and therefore calls for an effective monitoring tool. Let us see how OpManager helps you achieve this in addition to monitoring all other network resources.
We understand the importance of simplified, centralized monitoring. There is not much cooler than an application intelligently filtering for important event logs and notifying you periodically in addition to monitoring all the devices, applications, and other hardware resources.
OpManager offers a collection of predefined event log rules. Additionally, you have the flexibility to configure as many rules as necessary to fulfill your event log monitoring requirements and assign suitable severity levels. The default rules are customizable and can be adjusted or deleted as needed. With these rules, event logs are transformed into OpManager alarms, and you can receive notifications via email or SMS. The ability to define rules based on any or all of the Windows event log properties is undoubtedly advantageous.
OpManager acts as your network's guardian angel by keeping watch on the important event logs of the entire Windows environment, as discussed above. For instance, if a user with restricted access to specific machines accesses a network drive on one of those machines, this is a security concern. A failure audit event is recorded in the event logs, and you can see the event listed in the security event log category. With just a few clicks, you can configure this failure audit event log monitoring for all your Windows machines. When there is a security event of this nature, OpManager generates a corresponding, meaningful alarm and notifies you immediately over SMS or email.
It is impossible for an administrator to watch for a security breach in each and every machine's event logs. Life is easier when the admin can view all the problems from a single console. This is possible if OpManager is deployed in the network.
Some typical Windows events that OpManager monitors are listed below. OpManager also lets you create your own event rules.