 |
 
|
 |
|
Event data, sometimes referred to as an “audit trail” or “system of record” is a set of chronologically sequenced data records that captures information about an event. To optimize business processes, detect fraud and remain compliant, organizations are collecting event data from multiple sources, storing it online longer and analyzing it more frequently. To help organizations meet the technical and economic challenges of event data, SenSage has developed and patented an event data warehouse solution that provides actionable results at a fraction of the cost of traditional data warehouse solutions.
“SenSage is the only company that we are aware of that offers such an event warehousing solution and it is one that we think companies would do well to investigate.”
Philip Howard, Research Director, Bloor Research
Event data is everywhere
Event data is used to reduce security, fraud and compliance risks. Examples of event data include:
- Logs for compliance (PCI DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, etc.)
- Banking transactions such as online, ATM and debit card use
- Updates to shipping status in RFID records
- Historical prices of stocks and other instruments
- Call detail records (CDRs) of telephone transactions
- Internet protocol detail records (IPDRs) of web-based access and transactions
- Network, Windows, email and other systems management activity events
- Profile changes, database access to sensitive data, failed transactions
Event data is different from other data in traditional data warehouses
Event data has several different characteristics than data stored in traditional data warehouses:
- Volume: Event data is often stored for years with current implementations exceeding hundreds of terabytes and approaching a petabyte
- Time-based: Event data is always inserted and later searched on the basis of time, introducing storage and querying challenges that relational databases do not easily support
- Query requirements: Event data is written once, never updated but read many times
The SenSage Event Data Warehouse Solution
The SenSage Event Data Warehouse is purpose-built to provide actionable results from massive amounts of log and event data. Powerful features and benefits include:
- An integrated solution containing data collection (ETL), storage and business intelligence analytics components
- Data can be easily collected (without agents) from any source – databases, applications and logs
- Solution analytics including dashboards, alerts, summary and trending reports provide automatic visibility to issues. From any of these, detailed investigations and ad hoc queries into terabytes of data is a click away
- Data storage capabilities, built on a patented columnar database, provide a 40:1 compression advantage vs. traditional databases
- Advanced query techniques – data mining vs. “Google-like” search
- A clustered share-nothing architecture that allows for a deployment on inexpensive commodity hardware and incremental MPP scaling as data and query volume expand without an upgrade of the current environment
- Open access from a number of methods including SQL, Perl DBI, and JDBC
- Significantly lower TCO – 10:1 advantage in upfront costs and ongoing administrator/DBA support costs