If you’ve ever seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you might remember the scene where Indy and his dad are in a room replete with the most ornate chalices possible, only to realize that the Holy Grail is the most plain, utilitarian one in the room. Windows event logs are the IT version of the plain-looking clay cup that holds the key to answering your service questions and system issues.

As the person on the front lines, you know that providing the best service possible can be what makes your ITSM organization succeed. Every day, you work to build the relationships that help your organization create value for end-users. However, when you have inefficient processes, you end up having to be the person responding to an upset user.

As an IT service manager, you love solving problems and helping your people improve business processes. You thrive on those unexpected moments where your experience adds value, whether providing advice to someone in-house or collaborating with a customer. However, you need to have efficient processes and practices in place. Otherwise, you’re never going to be able to do the things you love the most.

When working with log messages, it’s critical that the timestamp of the log message is accurate. Incorrect timestamps can cause problems when trying to find log messages at a specific date/time or may cause alerts to not function properly. A common cause of incorrect timestamps for log messages is a mismatch of time zones between the log source (device sending the log) and log destination (device receiving the log, such as Graylog).