Sooner or later -- when applications crash, servers fail or suspected hacking activity appears -- the IT department will need to sort through logs to find critical information; this includes application logs, operating system logs, security logs and many others.

There are dozens of commercial products -- from companies such as Splunk Inc., LogLogic Inc., Q1 Labs, ArcSight (now part of Hewlett-Packard Co.), RSA, the security division of EMC, and so forth -- intended to make this task easier, but most are expensive and require substantial effort to implement correctly. These products are most useful when log analysis is a sustained, ongoing and funded task.

So, what options exist for companies where log analysis is more tactical in nature, not a sustained IT project, and has zero budget? Previously, I've described how Microsoft