In many infrastructures, logs exist but are barely used. Yet they are essential raw material for understanding incidents and improving security.

Why logs are essential

  • Diagnosing an outage or malfunction
  • Identifying abnormal behavior
  • Tracing an administrative action
  • Documenting a security incident

Important log sources

  • Windows Event Viewer: system, security, applications
  • Firewall: blocked and allowed connections
  • Web servers: access, errors, suspicious requests
  • VPN: remote connections and anomalies
  • Active Directory: authentications and changes

Centralize and correlate

Collecting locally is useful, but centralizing logs in a monitoring platform or SIEM makes them far more actionable.

An incident without logs is often an incident nobody understands. And an incident nobody understands is hard to fix for good.