Change Monitoring

Systems Failing and Unauthorized Changes go Undetected

Frequently the root cause of critical service problems is change. Unauthorized change is the worst kind. Until now, IT management has combatted unauthorized change through a combination of change control databases, configuration management, change monitoring and network change detection. The change control approaches have been incompletely applied, while the change monitoring approaches have resulted in expensive new information silos divorced from incident and problem response processes. Many unauthorized changes still go undetected, and many still cause problems.

Are you implementing or considering adding a new tool to your infrastructure just to monitor change? Have you thought about how this will integrate with the rest of your infrastructure? Does this represent a significant new cost?

Improve Visibility and Monitoring of Change

With Splunk, you can index, search and analyze all of your machine data from a single location in real-time, troubleshooting applications, investigating security incidents, and meeting compliance requirements in minutes instead of hours or days.

Using Splunk for change monitoring lets you capture and index all file system changes, database audit logs and Windows registry edits alongside configuration policy, change tickets, error events and other data for a contextualized view of a change. And you can use the same infrastructure for log management, operational monitoring and security.

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Splunk Benefits

  • Detect service-impacting change faster through comprehensive monitoring of changes to configuration files, registry, active directories, databases and more, across your entire IT infrastructure.
  • Reduce operational complexity and cost by performing change monitoring using the same infrastructure as log management, operational monitoring and security without the need to license or deploy additional agents.
  • Identify and remediate the root cause of service problems caused by unauthorized and authorized changes.
  • Detect potential security threats faster by monitoring changes to all configuration files, registry, active directories, databases and more across your entire IT infrastructure.
  • Reduce operational complexity and cost by performing change monitoring using the same infrastructure as log management, operational monitoring and security without the need to license or deploy additional agents.
  • Efficiently meet requirements to monitor filesystem integrity and audit changes to critical system configurations and files.
  • Reduce operational complexity and cost by performing change monitoring using the same infrastructure as log management, operational monitoring and security without the need for additional agents.
  • Ensure all information systems are secure, safeguarded and in compliance with privacy, information security laws and regulations by monitoring all production systems for authorized and unauthorized changes.

Change Monitoring Next Steps

Solution Guide
Splunk for Windows

Related Solutions

Change Monitoring Using Splunk

Splunk can monitor the filesystem for change events, index new or changed configuration files and scripts, query database audit logs, and integrate with CMDBs, source control, service desk/ticketing systems and other sources of change data. All alongside logs, errors and other related data.
Sysadmins and developers can search this data to investigate service problems and identify the root cause change events.
Over time, operations teams will add knowledge about how to interpret change in their environment, such as linking tickets to related changes as transactions, integrating asset data to tag hosts by severity and service, and identifying events that represent more or less risky changes.
This knowledge lets them turn searches into alerts to proactively monitor and notify them of unauthorized changes, high impact changes, changes outside of change windows, and changes to critical hosts.
It's easy for admins to create additional reports and dashboards specific to change issues in their environment. As your change monitoring process matures, you'll search Splunk proactively to review the impact of changes, by searching for activity on a given host or application before and after changes. You can facilitate this by integrating Splunk search links into service desk and ticketing workflows.