Lately I’ve been getting some questions about how to handle event logs when you do not have a SIEM or log collector in place. I like thinking about these situations as I know a lot of MSPs struggle with log analysis and collection.

As a test I’ve set our event logs to never overwrite as a lot of attackers these days simply try to spam the event log so hide their traces and make sure you can’t do forensics using the Windows Event logs. To make sure that we are able to view the past event logs we can use the following monitoring set. This set alerts when there is less than 10% space available in the event log.

The script checks the Application, System, and Security log.

$Logs = get-ciminstance -ClassName Win32_NTEventlogFile | Where-Object { $_.LogfileName -eq "Application" -or $_.LogfileName -eq "System" -or $_.LogfileName -eq "Security" }
$FullLogs = @()
foreach ($Log in $Logs) {
    if ($log.MaxFileSize / $log.FileSize -gt '1.1') { $FullLogs += "$($log.LogFileName) has less than 10% available." }
}
if (!$FullLogs) {
    $LogStatus = "Healthy"
}
else {
    $Logstatus = $FullLogs
}

Now that we have reporting and alerting available, the next step is to make sure we backup the logs to a secure location when we notice the logs are filling. To do this we use another script that is triggered as a self-healing protocol by our RMM system.

$RightNow = Get-Date -Format FileDateTime
$Logs = get-ciminstance -ClassName Win32_NTEventlogFile | Where-Object { $_.LogfileName -eq "Application" -or $_.LogfileName -eq "System" -or $_.LogfileName -eq "Security" }
foreach ($log in $logs) {
    $BackupPath = Join-Path "C:\SecureSecureLocation\$RightNow" "$($log.FileName).evtx"
    New-Item -ItemType File -Path $BackupPath -Force
    Copy-Item -path $($Log.Name) -Destination $BackupPath -Force
    If ($env:ClearLogs -eq "Clear") { Clear-EventLog $log.FileName }
}

There are a couple of cool things here – First is that we use the Get-date formatting FileDateTime, which makes a nice looking format for the folder where we want to store our backups, next is that we’re using New-item before copy-item, this is to make sure that the folder structure is created before we just copy the item over.

And that’s it! This way you can monitor the size of your event logs, and back them up automatically. As always, Happy PowerShelling!