Product Reviews

Event Management for the Enterprise

Aelita EventAdmin adds punch to simple event log monitoring.

One of the nice things about Windows NT and Windows 2000 is the Event Log. The Event Log, of course, records important things that happen on your system: failed logon attempts, browser elections, application errors, andmuch more. If you’re having a problem with system software, the Event Log is one of the first places to check for information. But Microsoft doesn’t really offer a lot of tools for working with Event Log records. There’s a simple viewer, but that’s it. You can’t get any overall feel for which events are the most common, or consolidate events from multiple computers. So as networks grow and servers spread around the LAN, the Event Log becomes less useful to the busy system administrator.

That’s where Aelita EventAdmin comes in. This utility can read the Event Log from any computer on your network and collect the information from the log. This information is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database and aggregated with log information from other computers. You can perform this data collection on a one-time basis, or schedule it to be performed periodically.

Once event information has been gathered, EventAdmin supplies a reporting console with over a hundred predefined reports. These range from simple summaries that will show you the most common events happening anywhere on your network to charts of activity (which users are generating the most failed logon events?) to analyses of Dr. Watson errors. You can filter these reports by date, computer, and other fields to quickly focus on hot spots in your network.

If you’re using Win2K, EventAdmin also lets you set the Audit Policy on remote computers. This lets you quickly standardize things like the logging failed logon attempts across your entire network. The program also collects information on current audit policy settings.

EventAdmin’s Reporting Console provides a variety of flexible reports that help make sense of your network’s event logs. Here, the events are grouped by source, making it easy to quickly identify components that are causing problems.

Aelita EventAdmin will be a welcome addition to the management tool set of anyone who needs to administer multiple NT or Win2K servers. You can download an evaluation copy from the company’s Web site.

About the Author

Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.

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