I was looking for a way to log events from one of my linux firewall/routers. It has been going down at strange times and I kept having to reboot it in the morning. After a bit of searching, I've settled on the following combination of software and technology to create a viable monitoring solution:
You could also use this in conjunction with another utility, https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECN/Resources/Documents/UNIX/evtsys, to consolidate your Microsoft Windows Server logs as well. (I haven't tried that yet, though.)
Set up a basic LAMP server, Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP.
Install the package syslog-ng. Configure syslog-ng to save all logs in a MySQL database. http://www.balabit.com/products/syslog_ng/
Install and configure php-syslog-ng. http://www.vermeer.org/projects/php-syslog-ng
There is some help available on configuring syslog-ng on the php-syslog-ng site.
You can search through the system log and look for specific events or even look for events from specific servers.