Definition
Event data records are created whenever some sort of transaction occurs. Event data records are generated at an extremely granular level by business applications, IT infrastructure, and security systems. Almost any type of record that is created to record a transaction and affixed with a timestamp meets the definition of an event data.
The contents of event data records are extremely crude and often meaningless unless correlated with other event data records.
Examples include business applications such as SAP, Oracle, IIS and thousands of others.
Examples of IT infrastructure includes servers, internetworking devices manufactured by Cisco and others, telecommunication switches, a SAN and message queues between systems.
Examples of security systems range from authentication applications including LDAP and RACF as well as IDS applications and other security systems.
A typical organization will have hundreds of sources of event records.
A single business transaction such as withdrawing cash from an Automated teller machine (ATM) or a customer placing an order will generate several hundred event data records in dozens of federated log files. It is not uncommon for organizations to generate terabytes of event data every day.
The retention and ability to quickly inspect event data records has become a necessity for the purposes of detecting suspicious activity, insider threats and other security breaches.
Read more about this topic: Event Data
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