The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution has set the beginning of a new age of data transfer. Each day, a massive number of new devices get added to all kinds of network infrastructures, transferring gargantuan amounts of data back and forth. In the next decade, we expect the number of IoTs to grow to a staggering 80 billion connected devices – practically outnumbering the human population tenfold.

We’ve already covered why log management is important, but we’ve only briefly touched upon one of the best ways that managing your log files can help you and your enterprise, which is, namely – with troubleshooting.

If you’re handling sensitive information, dealing with data loss can be more than just a headache. Log management tools such as Graylog can enhance your incident response and management strategies, and help you mitigate the damage when a breach occurs in your database. Minimizing data loss with a fast and scalable logging solution is key if you want to bring your cybersecurity to the next level.

O365beat is an exceptionally useful open-source log shipping tool created by counteractive. With a few simple tweaks, it can be used to fetch Office 365 audit logs from the Office 365 Management Activity API and forward them to Graylog. The best part of this tool is that it leverages all the flexibility and power of the beats platforms such as libbeat.

Have you ever needed to grab a log from a local server that is not part of the Windows Event Channel? Applications like IIS or DNS can write their logs to a local file, and you need to get them into your centralized logging server for correlation and visualization. Graylog sidecar can help by creating and managing a centralized configuration for a filebeat agent, to gather these types of logs across all your infrastructure hosts.

Business intelligence (BI) is all about making sense of huge amounts of data to extract meaningful and actionable insights out of it. Log management tools such as Graylog, instead, are the perfect solution to streamline data collection and analysis, so it’s easy to understand how these two technologies can make sense when they’re coupled together.

A Syslog server allows for the collection of logs into a centralized log repository. This centralized log repository allows for quick searching of your logs across your organization through different visualization tools. The Syslog web interface will provide the easiest access to the logs, and allows for easy secured remote access.

Docker containers are an amazing invention that simplified the lives of many IT departments. Container images are lightweight, easily standardizable, and highly secure. Docker is the technology of choice when you need to run several different (and possibly newer) applications on the same servers.

You have Gigabytes or Terabytes of logs coming in on a daily basis, but now what do you do with them? Should I keep 10 days, 30 days or 1 year? How do I rotate around my logs and configure them in Graylog? Let's talk about the best practices around log retention and how to configure them in Graylog. Log rotation can be done for various reasons ranging from meeting a compliance goal, keeping the size of the index down for faster searches or to get rid of data after a set amount of time.

Event correlation tools are a fundamental instrument in your toolbox to detect threats from all sources across your organization in real time. A wise use of the right event correlation techniques through log management and analysis is the cornerstone of any reliable security information and event management (SIEM) strategy – a strategy that focuses on prevention rather than reaction.