Turning Log Information into Business Intelligence

This month, for the Prism Microsystems Newsletter, I wrote about relationship mapping and getting the most intelligence out of your log management tool.

Now that we’re past January, most of us have received all of our W2 and 1099 tax forms. We all know that it’s important to keep these forms until we’ve filed our taxes and most of us also keep the forms for seven years after filing in case there is a problem with a previous year’s filing. But how many of us keep those records past the seven year mark? Keeping too much data can be as problematic as not keeping records at all. One of the biggest problems with retention of too much information is that storage needs increase and it becomes difficult to parse through the existing data to find what’s most important.

The challenge of balancing information with intelligence is often referred to as a “signal to noise ratio” problem. When there is too much noise, the signal gets lost. Without proper management, log data collection can quickly turn into a classic “white noise” scenario. Worst case, everything is stored, there is little organization, and the utility of the business intelligence is lost in terabytes of unsorted log entries.

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