Event logs are individual records of system activities and notable occurrences. Often referred to simply as events, these records are generated by various IT solutions and often cover a range of system components, such as operating systems, applications, processes, and cloud infrastructure, compute, and storage.
Event logs are an important IT resource for many reasons, including security, system and resource monitoring, and auditing. For security teams, event logs create a chronological trail of records, enabling them to track and analyze security events efficiently. For DevOps and SRE teams, event logs provide a way to analyze resource usage and troubleshooting to properly utilize and maintain functionality. Event logs are also important for auditing purposes, such as for compliance tracking and security event analysis.
Event logs consist of several types of information, such as the following:
- Event information. Event information includes the kind of event, such as a network traffic warning, and any other details outlined in the event log triggers.
- Event source and timestamp. Event source IP address and chronological information are crucial for identifying, investigating, and remediating performance and security incidents.
Monitoring and analyzing event logs efficiently for application performance and security is a key challenge for modern, cloud-native environments.
