IT event correlation automates the process of analyzing IT infrastructure events and identifying relationships between them to detect problems and uncover their root cause. Using an event correlation tool can help organizations monitor their systems and applications more effectively while improving their uptime and performance.
Enterprise IT infrastructures generate huge volumes of data in various formats, produced by servers, databases, virtual machines, mobile devices, operating systems, applications, sensors and other network components. An event is any piece of data that provides insight about a state change in that infrastructure, such as a user login. Many of these events are normal and benign but some will signify a problem within the infrastructure. Because a typical enterprise processes thousands of events each day, correlating all of them to determine which are relevant represents a significant challenge for IT teams.
As an answer to this issue, IT event correlation software ingests infrastructure data and uses machine learning to recognize meaningful patterns and relationships. Ultimately, these techniques enable teams to more easily identify and resolve incidents and outages, conduct performance monitoring and help improve the availability and stability of the infrastructure.
In the following sections, we’ll look at how event correlation works, the benefits it offers most organizations, the challenges it addresses and how you can get started using event correlation to better understand your infrastructure data.
IT event correlation relies on automation and software tools called event correlators, which receive a stream of monitoring and event management data automatically generated from across the managed environment. Using AI algorithms, the correlator analyzes these monitoring alerts to correlate events by consolidating them into groups, which are then compared to data about system changes and network topology to identify the cause and ideal solutions of the problems. Consequently, it’s imperative to maintain strong data quality and set definitive correlation rules, particularly when supporting related tasks such as dependency mapping, service mapping and event suppression.
The entire event correlation process generally plays out in the following steps:
Once the correlation process is complete, the original volume of events will have been reduced to a handful that require some action. In some event correlation tools, this will trigger a response such as a recommendation of further investigation, escalation or automated remediation, allowing IT administrators to better engage in troubleshooting tasks.
While many organizations correlate different types of events according to their particular IT environments and business needs, there are a few common types of event correlations:
Event correlation uses a variety of techniques to identify associations between event data and uncover the cause of an issue. The process is driven by machine learning algorithms that excel at identifying patterns and problem causation in massive volumes of data.
These are some of the common event correlation techniques:
You can easily find patterns and detect anomalies in IT events using an event correlation tool. After you run an initial search of your event data, an analyst can use the tool to group the results into event patterns. Because it surfaces the most common types of events, event pattern analysis is particularly helpful when a search returns a diverse range of events.
Event correlation tools usually include anomaly detection and other pattern identification functions as part of their user interface. Launching a patterns function for anomaly detection, for example, would trigger a secondary search on a subset of the current search results to analyze them for common patterns. The patterns are based on large groups of events to ensure accuracy, listed in order from most prevalent to least prevalent. An event correlation tool lets you save a pattern search as an event type and create an alert that triggers when it detects an anomaly or aberration in the pattern.
IT event correlation has many use cases and benefits, including:
Essentially IT event correlation helps businesses ensure the reliability of their IT infrastructure. Any IT issue can threaten a business’s ability to serve its customers and generate revenue. According to a 2020 survey, 25% of respondents worldwide reported the average hourly downtime cost of their servers was as high as US $400,000. Event correlation helps mitigate these downtime costs by supporting increased infrastructure reliability.
Event correlation can support network security by analyzing a large set of event data and identifying relationships or patterns that suggest a security threat.
As an example, imagine you notice multiple login attempts in a short amount of time on an account that has been dormant for years. After successfully logging in, the account begins executing suspicious commands. With the help of event correlation, an intrusion detection system could recognize these related events as a potential cyberattack and alert the appropriate team.
An event correlation tool can map and contextualize the data it ingests from infrastructure sources to identify suspicious patterns in real time. Some event correlation tools will also produce correlation reports for common types of attacks, including user account threats, database threats, Windows and Linux threats and ransomware, among others.
Event correlation equips IT teams to better respond to security threats and develop stronger policies to prevent them.
Since the dawn of enterprise computing, event correlation has been an essential practice for identifying and resolving IT problems that can have negative business impacts.
Historically, event correlation was a manageable manual process for IT teams when networks were simpler and predominantly contained on-premises. But today’s dynamic network environments can produce thousands or millions of events in a single day. Keeping up with the volume of events that modern infrastructures generate, let alone parsing them into actionable information, is beyond human capabilities. Event correlation technology can perform this task more quickly and cost effectively while freeing IT teams to focus more on resolving the problems instead of detecting them.
IT event correlation integrates into security information and event management (SIEM) by taking the incoming logs and correlating and normalizing them to make it easier to identify security issues in your environment. The process requires both the SIEM software and a separate event correlation engine. As such, it’s important to consider how each works to understand the benefit of using them together.
Learn about Splunk SIEM.
At its most basic level, SIEM collects and aggregates the log data generated throughout an organization’s IT infrastructure. This data comes from network devices, servers, applications, domain controllers and other disparate sources in a variety of formats. Because of its diverse origins, there are few ways to correlate the data to detect trends or patterns, which creates obstacles to determining if an unusual event signals a security threat or just an aberration.
Event correlation takes in all the logs entering your system and converts them into a consistent, readable format. Once logs are normalized, analysts can string together the clues spread among multiple types of logs and detect incidents and security events in real time. Event correlation also brings more clarity to log sources so you can recognize trends in incoming events.
To get started with event correlation, you need to find an event correlation solution that meets your organization’s specific needs. Consider the following when evaluating event correlators:
Beyond these criteria, it’s also important to check that any event correlator you’re considering can integrate with other tools and vendor partners you’re currently working with. In addition, it should also help you meet your business’s or industry’s compliance requirements, as well as offer robust customer support.
Once you’ve gotten started, optimize the practice with event correlation best practices.
The growing complexity of modern infrastructures and a more aggressive, sophisticated threat landscape have combined to make it more challenging than ever for IT teams to detect and resolve performance problems and security incidents. As these factors compound, event correlation will become an increasingly important tool for organizations to make certain their IT services are reliable. To that end, IT event correlation will continue to support and optimize network self-healing.
Event correlation will also need to continue to harness advances in analytics and artificial intelligence to keep pace with this dynamic environment. It will be especially significant in AIOps as organizations seek to process and analyze a flood of alerts in real time before they escalate into outages or network disruptions.
The clues to performance issues and security threats within your environment are in your event data. But IT systems can generate terabytes’ worth of data each day, making it virtually impossible to determine which events need to be acted upon and which do not. Event correlation is the key to making sense of your alerts and taking faster and more effective corrective action. It can help you better understand your IT environment and ensure it’s always serving your customers and your business.
Source: https://www.splunk.com/en_us/data-insider/it-event-correlation.html
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