Real-time remediation is one of its selling points. It also has a word cloud, which is a unique and interesting way to show keywords that appear frequently. It has a tree map, allowing a user to quickly and easily see things that may stand out in their environment. SolarWinds makes it easy to look though large numbers of logs with visual, drag-and-drop filters, as well as offering the capability to search. While most SIEMs allow users to write their own syslog parser, it was nice to see one that had agents for most everything we wanted and included parsers easily available for everything we needed. SolarWinds has parsers available for a large number of syslog types as well, and we found it could extract useful information from every syslog device in our environment. In many cases, it includes agents that allow for an almost zero setup syslog client. The solution aggregates syslogs, as well as having agents available for many common utilities, such as MS SQL and OSs like Debian or Windows. After that, we put agents on the machines we wanted to monitor - on Windows, this was pressing the next button, keying in the IP or hostname of the Log & Event Manager, and it just works. Setup involves simply downloading an open virtual appliance (OVA) and deploying it to a hypervisor.

SolarWinds includes agents to get detailed logs of different operating systems, hardware, network devices and applications, and includes the ability to parse through syslogs. SolarWinds Log & Event Manager is one of the most popular SIEMs on the market today - and with good reason.

Solarwinds log and event manager