With the current low prices for servers and the need for processing power, even a small company may end up with quite a few of them. If ten years ago it was still common to see an entire company using just one server, these days that's no longer the case.

New computers are added to the network with the understanding that they will be taken care of by the admins. Keeping an eye on these servers is a tedious, time-consuming process. Even with 5 minutes per server (to check the logs and other parameters), it may take an hour to make sure that everything is ok and no "red lights" are blinking on any of the servers.

Yet, what admin has an hour daily to ensure "due care"? In real life, the admins will check the servers only if something appears to be wrong with them. In an ideal world, the admins should be notified every time a errors or warnings are recorded in the server logs. Various monitoring solutions are available on the market, some quite complex, but many are trying to do too much or are reporting the wrong things. A PDF file with pie charts showing the distribution of events per server is pretty much useless. The cost of such solution may also become an issue even for bigger companies and add yet another burden to the administrators' shoulders.

Build a great reporting interface using Splunk, one of the leaders in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) field, linking the collected Windows events to www.eventid.net. The Windows Event Log Analysis Splunk App provides dashboards with all the relevant statistics collected from the event logs.