[logs] Visual Event Analysis WAS: most popular reports...?

From: Raffael Marty (rmarty@private)
Date: Thu Aug 19 2004 - 09:27:02 PDT


Marcus,

> I'm not convinced of the value of such systems outside of the
> cool-factor but it's mostly because I keep seeing them as
> just different ways of accessing the same underlying metaphors
> and presenting them in new ways. 

So far I agree with you. Visualization techniques cannot produce
information. We all are operating on the same sets of data, either events
from some kind of a system or raw packet dumps. Visualization does
certainly not generate new information.

> The underlying metaphors are really moving averages, runs tests,
> and distances from the mean.

I don't quite understand what you mean by this. There are more factors
that you can visualize. It's not all about statistical analysis and
graphing. What about event-graphs (or link-graphs)? They don't have
anything to do with moving averages, runs or distances from the mean.
Maybe I am missing your point here.

> What we haven't figured out how to do is use them in a
> way that helps, so visualizing is really just a cool way of
> graphically twiddling the "gain" "bass" and "treble" to see
> what comes out.

Here I vastly disagree. I don't think it's just a "cool" way of twiddling
data. I think it's a very powerful way of quickly analyzing big amounts
of data and getting a feeling for what is going on in a dataset. No
report can show you the amount of information that a graph can. A visual
representation of several thousend events can give you a very good
understanding on what's going on in the data and even uncover anomalies.

Cheers

	-Raffy

Disclaimer: Raffy's opinions might not be ArcSight's policy.

-- 

Raffael Marty, CISSP                          raffael.marty@private
Senior Security Engineer                    Content Team @ ArcSight Inc.
5 Results Way            Cupertino, CA  95014             (408) 864-2662
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