Ameren Chooses LogLogic to Help It Meet Regulatory Requirements

Nov. 26, 2008
Ameren Corp. has chosen LogLogic to supply its enterprise-class log management system.

Ameren Corp. has chosen LogLogic to supply its enterprise-class log management system.

LogLogic’s log management and intelligence solutions will allow Ameren to meet government regulatory requirements and improve real-time reporting and problem alerting by collecting user activity logs across a multitude of computer systems inside the company.

St. Louis-based Ameren provides energy services to 2.4 million electric customers and nearly 1 million natural gas customers across Illinois and Missouri.

As an electric and gas utility, Ameren is subject to stringent regulatory compliance requirements such as NERC (North American Electrical Reliability Corporation) reliability reporting and Sarbanes-Oxley. NERC regulatory requirements, as well as other compliance mandates, require Ameren to collect logs regularly across a multitude of systems throughout the enterprise and report on these systems.

To meet this requirement, Ameren needed the ability to access this log data across an enterprise of more than 1,000 Windows severs and several hundred Unix servers, and to parse the data in order to report on it intelligently.

Ameren also wanted an intuitive, easy-to-use solution that would enable employees of varying technical skills to get up to speed easily and quickly develop and run custom reports.

“Historically, Ameren had used a custom, in-house system to run compliance reports, but the solution was simply not robust enough to stand up to the increasing reporting demands of the business environment,” said Chris Sawall, the company’s Supervisor of Information Security. “Everyone running log reports has benefited from the switch to LogLogic. Stakeholders can now run custom reports easily. And since the logs are all in one spot, it’s easy to run reports or search for data to support investigations.”

“This aggregation of data is saving Ameren vast amounts of time, both in man-hours and in data processing time,” Sawall added. “Nightly reports that had been set up manually can now be set up and run on the fly, and whereas it used to take hours to gather log data from the company’s hundreds of servers, it now takes just a fraction of that time.”

Ameren is one of 150 new customers that LogLogic has acquired this year in retail, health care, financial services, telecom, aerospace and defense, pharmaceutical and utilities industries. While security and compliance remain key drivers for customers who choose LogLogic, broader use cases such as troubleshooting, user activity monitoring and managing business operations in real-time enable customers to maximize their investment with LogLogic.

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