I'm a programmer not a sysadmin but as we had a lot of trouble with our servers I thought I would be proactive and help our overworked (and learning) sysadmins.
We have 20-25 or so Windows Servers (2003 and 2008). They range from SQL Servers, Web Servers, doing batch processing, hosting internal applications etc. We do use WhatsUp as a monitor software to monitor memory, processor activity, website status etc.
But at the moment it seems like we are not monitoring the Event Log at all. I've seen that we have a lot of Errors and Warnings popping up in that Event Log and while I don't understand the impact of them all some seem potentially bad.
What is standard practice in this scenario? Does sysadmins usually go through the Event Log on each server manually monthly/weekly/daily during some service window? Do you have some aggregator software so you all servers manually check that way? Or some software that raises an alarm or email as soon as a Error/Warning shows up in a Event Log?
I've seen that WhatsUp have a plugin (that costs money) that can do this and I've also seen for example OSSEC suggested here. Is this something I should suggest, if so how important is it?