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
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“It’s a rare parent who can see his or her child clearly and objectively. At a school board meeting I attended . . . the only definition of a gifted child on which everyone in the audience could agree was “mine.””
—Jane Adams (20th century)
“I’m beginning to think that the proper definition of “Man” is “an animal that writes letters.””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.”
—William James (1842–1910)