Log monitoring: what you learn in the first 30 days
The first month of collecting logs in one place shows you things about your infrastructure you didn't know for years.
Most businesses have logs, but nobody looks at them. Every server, firewall and application keeps records in its own corner, and when something goes wrong they are either deleted or scattered. Once you start collecting logs in one place, this is what usually shows up in the first 30 days.
Week 1: Noise
In the first week you see thousands of warnings. Most are harmless: a misconfigured printer, an old service account failing to log in every minute, an application that keeps restarting. Cleaning up that noise is also a good to-do list for the health of your systems.
Week 2: Forgotten accounts
A VPN account still active for someone who left, admin accounts nobody owns, a test user logging in at 3 a.m. These are an attacker’s favourite doors.
Week 3: Attempts from outside
Every service exposed to the internet is scanned constantly. Logs show concretely which of your services are open to the outside and how often they are targeted. “Why is this port open?” is often born here.
Week 4: What normal looks like
By the end of the month you have a baseline: how many logins happen on an ordinary Tuesday, when traffic peaks. Spotting an attack starts with knowing what normal looks like.
For technical teams
You don’t need a big SIEM project to start. First collect authentication, firewall and critical server logs; settle the retention period (at least 90 days) and make sure the clocks are right (NTP). Keep alerts few but meaningful.
As part of Security and Audit, we collect your logs, tune meaningful alerts and review the first findings with you.