LogRhythm LR-500-XM review

There are plenty of standards designed to protect personal and sensitive data and businesses that don’t take regulatory compliance seriously are finding this can be a costly mistake. Log data management and analysis are important parts of the process and LogRhythm combines these functions into an appliance based solution and augments them with detailed log and event analysis.

LogRhythm is deployed as an appliance running Windows Server 2003 R2 and it offers a number of hardware solutions. On review we have the entry-level LR-500-XM, which is delivered as a good quality Dell PowerEdge 1950 1U rack server. The price shown includes support for 100 log sources but this can be upgraded as required.

We deployed our appliance as an all-in-one solution running the Log Manager and Event Manager components but you can distribute functions such as log gathering across multiple servers running LogRhythm agents. LogRhythm offers Log Manager agents for Windows, Unix and Solaris host systems and these don’t need to be dedicated to this task.

LogRhythm accepts log data from a wide range of sources and support includes syslog, syslog-ng, Windows drive mapping and Event Logs, ODBC connectors for database logs, flat files such as ASCII text, Cisco NetFlow and CheckPoint OPSEC/LEA collections.

The software is managed locally or remotely with a dedicated console, which we found easy to get to grips with. The console can be installed on any remote system and supports all versions of Windows. Deployment is simple enough as you tell your source devices where to send their log data to and LogRhythm will automatically collect this traffic.

Devices such as Windows servers can be automatically identified by their traffic so the appliance can add information such as the OS and version, hostname, associated IP address and Windows Event Logs. Other devices such as security appliances and routers that may be sending syslog data will need to be updated manually to specify the device type. LogRhythm does this as part of its customer deployment service so no user intervention is required.

Logs stored on the appliance are all digitally signed on receipt so it can be proved they haven’t been subsequently tampered with and archives are also digitally signed to ensure their integrity. Archive locations can be any type of storage device such as DAS, NAS, IP SAN and FC SAN.