How One IT Team Handles a 6-Person Workload with 5 Using Log Management

Some people say that you can never have too much of a good thing. Those people have clearly never had to monitor an enterprise network.

If your network is anything like most enterprise networks, you’re producing an absurd amount of data. And the volume of data is only skyrocketing as you add more things that light up and blink to your network.

Now, this can and should be a good thing—in theory. All of this device data should give you the ability to drill down into critical metrics, helping you monitor key meta trends like log volumes. And it should also help you troubleshoot key issues with your network faster, enabling you to sift through the noise to find problematic devices.

The challenge is that, in many cases, the sheer volume of data is a picture-perfect example of when too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing. Logs pile up quickly and network admins may not have a way to cut through this information to find the critical insight they need to take action.

While this log overload can become overwhelming for any IT team, it’s especially the case for small, nimble teams. Point in case: the team in charge of IT for the city of Pleasanton, California.

Log Management: The Full-Time Job You Can’t Afford

As a 5-person team (plus 1 GIS specialist), the City of Pleasanton’s IT department is a full-service shop that supports the needs of the local government, including city hall, the police department and even the public library. They try to keep everything in-house so they can run efficiently, and prefer not to outsource work to contractors.

For a long time, Pleasanton’s IT team collected logs and analyzed them via a third-party syslog tool. But when the team began using these logs do more security information management (SIM), the shortcomings of this tool became apparent.

“Log management was a generous name for it,” said Christopher Gerochi, IT Coordinator II, City of Pleasanton. “You still had to sift through the data manually to make sense of what was going in the organization. And at the time, it was overwhelming just because we didn’t know what to look for.”

Realizing that managing logs had become a full-time job, Pleasanton’s IT team began looking for another solution. This revealed a different challenge: many tools on the market didn’t fit the team’s needs. Either they were too simple and required a lot of leg work to get up and running, or they were too expensive and designed for a much larger team.

Breaking the Logjam with WhatsUp Gold 2021

The latest release of WhatsUp Gold features a new log management add-on that addresses this precise situation. In fact, we even worked closely with Chris during the tech preview phase of development to ensure we were producing a capability that provides value for real-world WhatsUp Gold customers, like the city of Pleasanton.

Not only does this new add-on bring log management and network monitoring capabilities together under one roof, it also provides a simple, easy-to-use tool for managing logs. The end result is enterprise-grade network monitoring and powerful log management that makes your job as a network admin much easier.​

“WhatsUp Gold 2021 is a huge jump for us in terms of log management,” Chris said based off his preview experience. “I like how the new integrated capability gathers all the information in a single pane of glass and makes it easy to sift through the data quickly.”

“With the network monitoring software, NetFlow and log management all in one place, we have all the information we need at our fingertips so we can act instantly. It’s a huge win, it makes the whole diagnostic process much easier,” he added.

Simply put, if you’re one of the many WhatsUp Gold customers that doesn’t currently use a log management tool but increasingly sees a need for one, you’ll want to check out WhatsUp Gold 2021. With embedded dashboards, alerting, device cards and search capabilities, WhatsUp Gold 2021 gives you visibility into your device log data and lets you manage it like never before. Note that the Log Management add-on is included for free in the Total Plus edition.

Try yourself with a free trial of WhatsUp Gold or see it in action with our interactive online demo. You can also watch our webinar to learn more about the other improvements in the WhatsUp Gold 2021 release.