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.
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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.
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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.