Microsoft recommended application log events

You might want to examine logs from high-frequency Microsoft application events when doing the following:

• Maintaining Microsoft Windows systems

Prerequisites 

In order to execute this procedure in your environment, the following data, services, or apps are required:

• Windows update logs
• Splunk Add-on for Microsoft Windows

Example

A solid event log monitoring system is a crucial part of any secure Windows environment or Active Directory design. Many computer security compromises could be discovered early if the victims enacted appropriate event log monitoring and alerting. This search leverages application monitoring recommendations provided by Microsoft to identify whether an event should be considered of low, medium, or high criticality in detecting attacks and errors.

NOTE: To optimize the search shown below, you should specify an index and a time range. 

1. Verify that you deployed the add-on to the search heads and Splunk Universal Forwarders on the monitored systems. For more information, see About installing Splunk add-ons.
2. Run the following search: 

sourcetype=WinEventLog 
|stats count BY EventCode LogName severity Type signature 
|rename count AS Total_Events Type AS Event_Type 
|fillnull value=0 Total_Events 
|sort - Total_Events 
|table LogName EventCode severity Event_Type signature Total_Events

Search explanation

The table provides an explanation of what each part of this search achieves. You can adjust this query based on the specifics of your environment.

Result

The following table shows sample search results. It shows what events took place, ordered by count of events (Total_Events). The other columns give descriptions of the events. From the table, you can decide what to further summarize or pay attention to. 

While the search provided above gives a full picture of event codes that occur in your network, you might find a targeted search for risky errors more useful. After understanding the general state of your applications, you could run the following search to identify specific computers and users who are linked to application logs that can benefit from further investigation:

sourcetype=wineventlog Type=ERROR OR severity=high 
|stats count by Type severity ComputerName User

You can save the search and results as a dashboard, a report (saved search), or as an alert and associate an action with the event, such as opening a ticket or sending a notification to the on call help desk for rapid action.