Struggling with time constraints and overwhelming workloads, the IT department of Poland’s largest private gas distributor turned to Logmanager to work more efficiently.

Key challenges

G.EN. GAZ ENERGIA, the largest private natural gas distributor in Poland, serves over 40,000 clients across 87 municipalities in five districts.

Its IT department was looking for a solution that would:

  • Aggregate data from a large distributed environment comprising hundreds of systems,
  • help with the analysis of security events coming from internal file systems,
  • offer a strong data protection without any possibility of its modification.
  • Provide quick implementation and no license restrictions.

When testing Logmanager, the customer also considered purchasing alternative SIEM solutions. However, after a detailed investigation, those proved to be inadequate due to the complexity of usage and maintenance, as well as high license costs.

Implementation

During the initial, proof of concept (PoC) phase, Logmanager was implemented to a demo box delivered to the client. The goal of the PoC was to verify how Logmanager fits the customer’s needs and to select the best fitting size of the solution.

Then, the Logmanager platform was configured to present customer data in custom made dashboards tailored to their needs. Alerts had been created for high severity security events, such as high volume of file deletions in a short time-frame. Additionally, the customer asked for configuration of scheduled reports informing about user access to sensitive files.

Finally, G.EN. GAZ ENERGIA decided to deploy the Logmanager Model M, which fully satisfied its performance and storage needs. Apart from capabilities tested during PoC, implementation also included configuration of Windows and VMware sources, and also creation of additional security alerts related to user accounts, such as changes in account configurations or multiple failed login attempts.

Impactful results

Currently, G.EN. GAZ ENERGIA is using Logmanager to monitor their infrastructure and to solve day to day operational and security issues. Thanks to the professional approach and ongoing support provided by Advatech, a certified Logmanager partner, the platform was implemented quickly and seamlessly, without any interference to the production environment.

“Because of the constant lack of time due to the high workload, we were looking for a solution which would make our jobs easier, instead of complicating it. Solutions competitive to Logmanager, even though effective, didn’t really follow this convention. Logmanager perfectly addressed our needs – it’s simple to use and maintain and at the same time has all the crucial functionalities.”

Artur Lech
IT manager
G.EN. GAZ ENERGIA

The most used capabilities include collecting, analyzing, and reporting user activities on important files, quick search and filtering of operational data (such as system status) for issue resolution, and automatic alerting on the detection of defined conditions in logs (such as multiple failed login attempts).

Among others, G.EN. GAZ ENERGIA particularly values Logmanager for:

  • Easy PoC, fast implementation and immediate readiness to process logs,
  • Transparency, high efficiency, and radical simplicity,
  • No license restrictions,
  • Easy access to file system events (who and when deleted/edited/copied data),
  • Security of stored data,
  • Support in systems diagnostics and resolving security incidents,
  • Support in solving day-to-day operational issues.