Server log monitoring on a small budget

Most serious incidents, whether ransomware, business email compromise or data theft, involve your servers at some point, either as the target or as a stepping stone to it. If nobody is watching the event logs on those machines, you can miss the stretch of time when an attacker is moving around before the real damage happens.

In Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, about 96% of ransomware victims whose size was known had fewer than 1,000 employees. CrowdStrike’s 2026 Global Threat Report found that 82% of its detections involved no malware. The attacker signs in with valid credentials, uses PowerShell, WMI and RDP, and moves between machines without dropping a binary. CrowdStrike puts the average time for criminal groups to move from the first machine to the next at 29 minutes, and the fastest it saw was 27 seconds.

Where EDR has limits

EDR is good at catching malware and suspicious process behavior. When an attacker uses an admin’s stolen credentials to RDP into a file server and then works with tools that ship with Windows, each action on its own can look like normal administration. Telling the real admin apart from the attacker takes context from the event logs: who connected, from where, at what time, and what they did after logging on, in addition to which processes ran.

Start with the servers

If time and budget are limited, monitor your servers first. Most of the events that matter for both compliance and attack detection are concentrated on domain controllers, file servers and the systems that handle regulated data. These include logon successes and failures (4624/4625), service installations (7045), RDP session reconnects and disconnects (4778/4779), and special privileges assigned at logon (4672). Sophos’s 2026 report puts the median time an attacker spent in a network before being found at three days, so the server logs are where you have the best chance of noticing them in time.

Flat-rate server monitoring

Arden runs on a Windows machine you control and collects Windows event logs from agents on your servers. It looks for patterns common in real intrusions, including stolen-credential use, lateral movement, persistence and privilege abuse, and raises an alert when it finds them. It detects many of these attacks but not all of them, and it does not block anything, so responding to an alert is still up to you. The agents send logs only to your Arden server. There is no cloud service and no telemetry. Pricing hasn’t been announced yet; it will be a flat monthly rate based on the size of your environment, with no per-GB ingest fees. If your framework calls for log monitoring (HIPAA, PCI DSS, CMMC, CJIS), the logs stay on your own hardware.

Arden doesn’t do everything Splunk does. For a team that has no log monitoring on its servers today, the more useful comparison is with having nothing in place. We also have guides on spotting lateral movement and detecting credential dumps, a look at the hidden costs of a traditional SIEM, and a comparison of SIEM pricing for 2026.