Event monitoring software can accelerate software development and test cycles. Event monitoring data is usually machine data generated by the IT systems. Such data can enable real-time searches to gain insights into user experience. Dashboards with charts can then help analyze the data. This data can be accessed over TCP, UDP and HTTP. Data can also be warehoused for analysis. Issues that frequently recur can be documented and searched more quickly with the availability of such data leading to faster debugging and problem solving. For example, data can be queried to identify errors in the logs which could be addressed remotely.
Machine data is massive and generated in streams. Being able to quickly navigate the volume to find the most relevant information for triaging issues is a differentiating factor for the event monitoring software. Early warning notifications, running rules engine, detecting trends are some of the features that enable not only rapid development and test by providing feedback of deployed software but also increase customer satisfaction as code is incrementally build and released.
Data is available to be collected, indexed, searched and reported. Applications can target specific interests such as security or correlations for building rules and alerts. Data is also varied such as from network, from applications, and from enterprise infrastructure. Powerful querying increases the usability of such data. For example, security data may inform about threats, the ability to include non-security user and machine data may add insight into unknown threats. Queries could also cover automated anomaly and outlier detection that help with understanding advanced threats. Queries for such key valued data can be written using PIG commands such as load/read, store/write, foreach/iterate, filter/predicate, group-cogroup, collect, join, order, distinct, union, split, stream, dump and limit. The depth and breadth of possibilities with event monitoring data seems endless. As more and more data becomes available and richer and powerful analytical techniques grow, this will help arm the developers and operation engineers to better address the needs of the organization. Some of the differentiators of such software include the ability to have one platform, fast return on investment, ability to use different data collectors, use non-traditional flat file data stores, ability to create and modify existing reports, ability to create baselines and study changes, programmability to retrieve information as appropriate and ability to include compliance, security, fraud detection etc. If applications are able to use the event monitoring software, it will be evident from the number of applications that are written.