logging

Some people like to know everything there is to know about what their PC is doing. Not me. I just want the dang thing to work, and when it stops working, I want the simplest, surest, fastest, and cheapest fix available, skip the details.

This puts me at odds with PC pros who believe there's nothing blissful about tech ignorance. Okay, I see their point, but there are a world of things I'd rather be doing than scrolling through Windows event logs.

When I described ways to diagnose a hanging application, several readers took me to task for … Read more

In my last blog, I wrote about the ArcSight IPO and its significance to the marketplace. I pointed to the fact that ArcSight revenue jumped from just less than $40 million to a hair less than $70 million year-over-year, a metric illustrating just how hot the security management market is. Ditto for closely related log management. According to ESG research, nearly half of all enterprise companies collect at least a terabyte of log data each month, and this capacity continues to grow as more log data is collected from more devices and left online for longer periods of time. In … Read more

What's the fastest-growing data source at large organizations? Video? Maybe at YouTube, but not at Citibank. The answer is log files. Yup, those mundane text messages produced by every conceivable technology device are growing like a proverbial weed.

Why the log file explosion? First off, every IT shop has more and more devices to manage each day, and more devices mean more logs. In the past, most IT managers paid limited attention to logs, but this too has changed. Driven by security monitoring, regulatory compliance reporting, and IT troubleshooting, large organizations now aggregate, analyze, store, and archive terabytes of … Read more

Three programs with big names have recently released some minor updates. Take a look at what's changed in the Opera Web browser, the remote access app LogMeIn, and Orb, which gives you the power to stream your music just about anywhere.

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Paying users of WebEx's remote desktop service now have the added bonus of Mac support. The service has been upgraded to be cross-platform in time for next week's Macworld Expo and throws in a couple other goodies like a remote Webcam viewer (so you can spy on your home computer from the office and visa versa), and a guest pass system that lets you send someone a one-time coupon to use your computer from wherever they are.

It's kind of surprising it's taken WebEx this long to get a Mac version of its remote client service … Read more

My New Year's resolutions for 2007 were largely a flop, although I did frame and hang some vintage 1930s cruise ship menus as promised.

But if you're dead set on changing your life in 2008, many Web sites can assist with tallying and tracking resolutions. Some will continue to ping you with reminders, or even enlist other folks to pester you over the next 12 months. Facebook users can pick from various third-party widgets for setting and sharing goals, but other sites offer more customization.

Sweet and simple, Joe's Goals help you log progress on to-do items … Read more

The move to archive nearly everything we do online has been spearheaded mainly by Google in both Gmail as well as Google Web history. The same thing is happening in the chat space with Meebo and Google Talk, as well as desktop chat clients that have had integrated chat logging for years now. The one thing missing has been a way to take those locally saved conversations and make them available for search and reading while away from your home machine. IM History and Simkl are two companies have jumped on the task in an attempt to let people archive … Read more

LogLogic, a software company with an open-source twist to the business of monitoring and analyzing server log files, has hired software industry veteran Pat Sueltz to be its new chief executive.

Sueltz has made the rounds in the software industry, working at IBM, Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com, and most recently, SurfControl, which as CEO Sueltz sold to Websense for more than $400 million in April.

LogLogic sells proprietary software but also made an open-source move in 2006 with a component called Lasso, governed by version 2 of the General Public License (GPL).

LogLogic's acting CEO, Dominique Levin, now is … Read more

The first part of this posting on dealing with software crashes covered preventing the leakage of personal information, portable applications, and controlling the programs that run automatically when Windows starts up. Here we look at dumps, event logs, and disk checking, but first, we pick up on the topic of drivers.

Driver Verifier

In Windows, the term "driver" refers to software used by the operating system to control the hardware in the computer. Each piece of hardware (sound, video, printer) has an associated driver program.

The last topic in the previous posting was an airplane analogy to illustrate … Read more