Design of a Log Server for Distributed and Large-Scale Server Environments

Collection, storage and analysis of multiple hosts’ audit trails in a distributed manner are known as a major requirement, as well as a major challenge for enterprise-scale computing environments. To ease these tasks, and to provide a central management facility, a software-suit, named as “LogHunter” has been developed. Log-Hunter is a secure distributed log server system which involves log collection and consolidation in a large-scale environment having multiple hosts that keeps at least one audit trail. This architecture also eases the inspection and monitoring of the audit trails generated on multiple hosts. By consolidating all the audit trails on a centralized server, it significantly reduces the manpower requirement, and also provides secure log storage for inspection of log entries as it becomes necessary. This paper presents the functional specifications, architecture and some preliminary performance results of the Log-Hunter.