Monitoring network activity is both important and tedious, and these tools can make it easier.
Monitoring online activity is a tedious task, but there are good reasons for doing so. For example, it allows you to find and investigate suspicious logins on workstations and devices and servers connected to the network, while determining what administrators are abusing. You can also track software installations and data transfers to identify potential problems in real time, rather than after damage has occurred.
The logs also help keep your company in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which applies to any entity operating within the European Union. If your website is accessible in the EU, then you are eligible to comply with the regulation.
Logging, including tracing and analysis, should be an essential process in any monitoring infrastructure setup. To recover SQL Server databases from a disaster, transaction log files are required. In addition, by tracking log files, DevOps teams and database administrators (DBAs) can maintain optimal database performance or, in the event of a network attack, find evidence of unauthorized activity. Therefore, it is important to monitor and analyze system logs regularly. This is a reliable way to recreate the chain of events that caused any problems.
Many open source log trackers and analysis tools are now available, making it easier than you might think to choose the right resource for active logging. The free and open source software community provides log design for a variety of sites and operating systems. Here are five of the best tools I’ve used, in no particular order.
Graylog
Graylog was founded in Germany in 2011 and is now available as an open source tool or commercial solution. It is designed to be a centralized log management system that accepts data streams from different servers or endpoints and allows you to quickly browse or analyze that information.
Graylog has a good reputation among system administrators because it is easy to scale. Most Web projects start small, but they can grow exponentially. Graylog can balance the load on the back-end service network and process several TERabytes of log data per day.
IT administrators will find Graylog’s front end interface easy to use and powerful. Graylog is built around the concept of a dashboard that allows you to select the metrics or data sources you think are most valuable and quickly see trends over time.
When a security or performance incident occurs, IT administrators want to be able to trace the source based on symptoms as much as possible. Graylog’s search feature makes this easy. It has built-in fault tolerance and can run multi-threaded searches, so you can analyze multiple potential threats at once.
Nagios
Started in 1999 by a single developer, Nagios has evolved into one of the most reliable open source tools for managing log data. The current version of Nagios can integrate with servers running Microsoft Windows, Linux, or Unix.
Its primary product is a log server, designed to simplify data collection and make information more accessible to system administrators. The Nagios log server engine captures the data in real time and feeds it into a powerful search tool. Integration with new endpoints or applications is easy through the built-in setup wizard.
Nagios is most commonly used by organizations that need to monitor the security of their local networks. It can audit a range of network-related events and help distribute alerts automatically. Nagios can even be configured to run predefined scripts if certain conditions are met, allowing you to resolve problems before people get involved.
As part of the network audit, Nagios filters log data based on the geographic location of the source of log data. This means that you can use mapping technology to build comprehensive dashboards to understand how Web traffic is flowing.
Elastic Stack (ELK Stack)
The Elastic Stack, commonly known as the ELK Stack, is one of the most popular open source tools (and a personal favorite of mine) for organizations that need to sift through large amounts of data and understand their logging systems.
Its main product consists of three separate products: Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash:
- As the name suggests, Elasticsearch is designed to help users find matches in data sets using multiple query languages and types. Speed is its greatest advantage. It can scale into clusters of hundreds of server nodes, easily handling petabytes of data.
- Kibana is a visualization tool that works in conjunction with Elasticsearch, allowing users to analyze their data and build powerful reports. When you first install the Kibana engine on a server cluster, you’ll see an interface that displays statistics, charts, and even animations.
- The last part of the ELK Stack is the Logstash, which acts as a pure server-side pipe into the Elasticsearch database. You can integrate Logstash with a variety of programming languages and apis so that information from your website and mobile applications can be fed directly into the powerful Elastic Stalk search engine.
One unique feature of the ELK Stack is that it allows you to monitor applications built on WordPress open source sites. In contrast to most out-of-the-box security audit log tools that track administrative and PHP logs, ELK Stack filters Web server and database logs.
Poor log tracking and database management are among the most common causes of poor web site performance. Not checking, tuning, and cleansing database logs on a regular basis not only slows down your site, but can cause it to crash completely. As such, ELK Stack is an excellent tool for every WordPress developer’s toolkit.
LOGalyze
LOGalyze is a Hungaria-based organization that builds open source tools for system administrators and security specialists to help them manage server logs and turn them into useful data points. Its main products can be downloaded for free by individual or business users.
LOGalyze is designed as a vast pipeline in which multiple servers, applications, and network devices can provide information using a simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) approach. It provides a front end interface that administrators can log into to monitor datasets and start analyzing data.
In LOGalyze’s Web interface, you can run dynamic reports and export them to Excel files, PDF files, or other formats. These reports can be based on multidimensional statistics managed by the LOGalyze backend. It can even combine data fields across servers or applications to help you spot performance trends.
LOGalyze is designed to be installed and configured in less than an hour. It has pre-built capabilities that allow it to collect audit data in the format required by law. For example, LOGalyze can easily run different HIPAA reports to ensure that your organization complies with health laws and maintains compliance.
Fluentd
If your organization’s data sources are located in many different locations and environments, your goal should be to keep them together as much as possible. Otherwise, it will be difficult to monitor performance and guard against security threats.
Fluentd is a powerful data collection solution that is fully open source. Instead of providing a complete front end interface, it serves as a collection layer to help organize the different pipes. Fluentd is used by some of the largest companies in the world, but can also be implemented in smaller organizations.
Fluentd’s greatest benefit is that it is compatible with the most commonly used technology tools today. For example, you can use Fluentd to gather data from Web servers (such as Apache), smart device sensors, and MongoDB’s live records. What you do with the data is entirely up to you.
Fluentd is based on the JSON data format and can be used with more than 500 plug-ins created by talented developers. This allows you to extend log data to other applications and get better analysis from it with minimal manual effort.
Write in the last
If for security reasons, government compliance, and measuring productivity reasons, you haven’t used activity logs yet, start changing now. There are many plug-ins on the market that work with multiple environments or platforms and can even be used on internal networks. Don’t wait for serious incidents to occur to take a proactive approach to maintaining and monitoring logs.
Via: opensource.com/article/19/…
By Sam Bocetta, lujun9972
This article is originally compiled by LCTT and released in Linux China