Log management is the process for generating, transmitting, storing, accessing, and disposing of log data. A log data (or logs) is composed of entries (records), and each entry contains information related to a specific event that occur within an organization's computing assets, including physical and virtual platforms, networks, services, and cloud environments. The process of log management generally breaks down into:

Overview

The primary drivers for log management implementations are concerns about security, system and network operations (such as system or network administration) and regulatory compliance. Logs are generated by nearly every computing device, and can often be directed to different locations both on a local file system or remote system. Effectively analyzing large volumes of diverse logs can pose many challenges, such as: Users and potential users of log management may purchase complete commercial tools or build their own log-management and intelligence tools, assembling the functionality from various open-source components, or acquire (sub-)systems from commercial vendors. Log management is a complicated process and organizations often make mistakes while approaching it. Logging can produce technical information usable for the maintenance of applications or websites. It can serve:

Terminology

Suggestions were made to change the definition of logging. This change would keep matters both purer and more easily maintainable:

Deployment life-cycle

One view of assessing the maturity of an organization in terms of the deployment of log-management tools might use successive levels such as: