| Without a real-time alert (less than a second), security personnel may be unaware of an impending failure of the audit functions and system operation may be adversely impacted. Alerts provide organizations with urgent messages. Automated alerts can be conveyed in a variety of ways, including via a regularly monitored console, telephonically, via electronic mail, via text message, or via websites.
Log processing failures include software/hardware errors, failures in the log capturing mechanisms, and log storage capacity being reached or exceeded. Most firewalls use UDP to send audit records to the server and cannot tell if the server has received the transmission, thus the site should either implement a connection-oriented communications solution (e.g., TCP) or implement a heartbeat with the central audit server and send an alert if it is unreachable. |
