Event Alarm Monitors EVT and EVTX Logs, Side-By-Side!

Event Alarm Version 6 was released in late August. This week, we sent out our official version update announcement.

Just like our prior Event Analyst and Event Archiver releases, this version of Event Alarm is completely Microsoft Vista™ and Windows Server ® 2008 compatible, and features our revolutionary LogRefiner™ technology. You can download Version 6 of Event Alarm here.

We've already mentioned in a bunch of posts that trying to read legacy EVT files on Windows Vista and Server 2008 is quite a chore, with missing fields and information being quite common.

Well here's the good news. Thanks to our pioneering LogRefiner™ technology, you can remotely monitor EVT and EVTX files natively and side-by-side when Event Alarm is installed to a Microsoft Vista or Server 2008 computer. No weird conversions or intermediate steps are necessary, and you get all the data parsed correctly from both log formats the first time. For those admins who are attempting to run Windows Vista or Server 2008 on their workstations, this is a big plus because now you can use Event Alarm as your preferred monitoring solution for all of your Microsoft Windows computers, regardless of how many have been migrated forward to Vista/Server 2008 and the new EVTX format.

On top of Event Alarm's remote, agentless log monitoring, when Event Alarm is purchased as part of Dorian Software's Total Event Log Management Solution™, you effectively have a comprehensive platform for archiving, analyzing, and monitoring event log data from EVT and EVTX log files throughout your network, all from a single install point, network topology permitting.

Here's the full launch announcement for Event Alarm Version 6, complete with a comprehensive feature listing.

Importer™ Tool for Event Archiver® Released

One of the more challenging things about log management is trying to collect the vast amount of data that is generated in multi-site networks over limited bandwidth links.

To that end, we have developed a companion tool to our Event Archiver® software - the Importer™ tool for Event Archiver.

Basically, you can instruct all of your various Event Archiver installations to send compressed sets of log data in EVT/EVTX and comma-delimited formats to a computer running the Importer utility. You can use Microsoft Windows file shares or FTP to transport the compressed log file pairs as needed.

Once received, the Importer utility can decompress the log data and automatically import it into a central Microsoft SQL or Oracle database for analysis by our Event Analyst® software.

If you want to deploy a log management solution, but are struggling with the concept of consolidating your data over limited bandwidth pipes, this tool is the answer. It's also a better system than having to deploy an agent to every computer on your network; using the Importer system, you typically only need to deploy one instance of Event Archiver to each local network / branch office.

As far as bandwidth considerations go, by transmitting the data in compressed form, the bandwidth necessary is only 7 to 10% that of the uncompressed log files. We have clients who have successfully used this solution over satellite links, so it has been proven in the field.

For more information on the Importer utility for Event Archiver, including licensing costs, please visit http://www.doriansoft.com/importer

Event Analyst Works With EVT and EVTX Files, Side-By-Side!

Greetings, gentle readers. It's been a while since our last blog post, but that's because we've been slaving on the Version 6 release of Event Analyst. And what a fantastic release it is!

Just like our Event Archiver release of a few months ago, this version of Event Analyst is completely Microsoft Vista™ compatible, and features our revolutionary LogRefiner™ technology. You can download it here: http://www.doriansoft.com/download.

We've already mentioned in a bunch of posts that trying to read saved, legacy EVT files on Windows Vista is quite a chore, with missing fields and information being quite common. In fact, a recent blog posting from the Performance Team at Microsoft shows you how to perform a whole bunch of contortions in an attempt to convert an EVT file to an EVTX file, with of course there being no guarantee that the converted log will parse properly when you attempt to read it.

Well here's the good news. Thanks to our pioneering LogRefiner™ technology, you can work with EVT and EVTX files natively and side-by-side when Event Analyst is installed to a Microsoft Vista computer. No weird conversions or intermediate steps are necessary, and you get all the data parsed correctly from both log formats the first time. For those admins who are attempting to run Windows Vista on their workstations, this is a big plus because now you can use Event Analyst as your preferred log reader/analysis tool/reporting tool for all of your systems and your saved EVT log files. You no longer need to convert EVT files or juggle both the Microsoft Classic Event Viewer and the new Vista Event Viewer when switching back and forth between EVT and EVTX files.

Here's a screenshot of both an EVT and EVTX log being viewed within Event Analyst 6 at the same time:




Again, bear in mind that this technology lets you work with active AND saved EVT files from your older operating systems all natively inside Vista. It's very cool stuff.

We'll have more information for you on this technology soon, including a very nice licensing promotion, so please stay tuned.