Eventloganalyse

Eventloganalyse, or event log analysis, is the systematic examination of logs generated by information technology systems to understand activities, detect anomalies, and support operations, security, and compliance. Logs come from operating systems (for example Windows Event Log, syslog), applications, network devices, and cloud services. The practice involves collecting, normalizing, indexing, and analyzing events to identify normal patterns, faults, and security incidents.

Typical workflows include collecting logs from multiple sources, parsing diverse formats, and normalizing data to a common schema. Accurate timestamps and clock synchronization are essential. Analysts correlate events across systems, build timelines, filter noise, and drill down to incidents. Methods range from rule-based alerts and dashboards to statistical methods and anomaly detection, pattern mining, and, forensics for root-cause analysis.

Applications span IT operations, performance monitoring, capacity planning, security monitoring, incident response, and compliance auditing. It supports proactive alerting, rapid triage, post-incident analysis, and regulatory reporting, while improving observability in cloud and DevOps environments.

Tools include SIEMs and log aggregators such as Splunk, Elastic Stack, Graylog, and vendor-specific solutions; log formats include syslog and Windows Event Log. Time synchronization protocols (NTP/PTP) ensure consistent ordering. Best practices emphasize log integrity, secure transmission, access controls, data retention, and alignment with frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK for security analysis.

Challenges include data volume, noise, schema heterogeneity, privacy, and clock skew. Effective approaches rely on centralized collection, normalization, scalable indexing, targeted alerting, documented retention, and regular validation of data quality.