Extreme server monitoring

[AMDfreak]

I'm looking for software that can write to a log every process that is run on a machine. As part of an upcoming security audit, we need to have a means of tracking all administrator commands that are run on a server. Any ideas?

 

[nweaver]

OS?

 

[warcrow]

Whats the budget?

 

[Nothinman]

Those logs will be absolutely huge, you will need some form of external storage. If this is Windows you'll have to find some way to get the Eventlogs off of the machine, or at least out of their binary format, otherwise the logs will fill up and you'll lose entries.

 

[AMDfreak]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Those logs will be absolutely huge, you will need some form of external storage. If this is Windows you'll have to find some way to get the Eventlogs off of the machine, or at least out of their binary format, otherwise the logs will fill up and you'll lose entries.

That's what we were thinking too. This would be for Windows 2k and 2k3 servers, but budget needs to be kept as small as possible. We're pushing back on the client that's doing the auditing since they really haven't been able to give us an idea of how to (reasonably) acomplish what they want. It also doesn't help that we haven't been able to talk directly to their IT guys. All comms have been going through our company's client liasons.

I'll take any suggestions, even outlandish and costly ones if for nothing else to show that their requests are unreasonable.

 

[MrChad]

What exactly are you logging? If you just need a list of processes you can use the free PsList. It can query a server remotely, and you can redirect the output to a text file.