For our customers, firewall logs play a critical role in network security. By monitoring, recording, and analyzing their firewall logs on a regular basis, they can gain network insights on a variety of topics, including threat intelligence, bandwidth usage, regulatory compliance, and capacity planning.
Detailed analysis of the logs provides critical network intelligence about attempts to breach security, ultimately allowing IT practitioners to minimize security threats like network intrusion, virus attacks, and denial of service (DoS) attacks. Firewall logs provide valuable information about bandwidth usage, employee internet usage, bandwidth guzzling web sites, and interface wise traffic, all of which help identify and stop bandwidth misuse. Analyzing the logs also helps in identifying trends in the internet usage, enabling network administrators to plan bandwidth capacity effectively.
Different countries have different regulations on how long logs need to be stored for legal and auditing purposes. In case of a security breach, these logs are critical for law enforcement authorities to identify and analyze the reason for the breach.