WASHINGTON – NetIQ announced Tuesday an upgrade to its security information and event-management software that adds user-access monitoring, real-time auditing and threat detection.

NetIQ Security Manager 6.0 with Change Guardian for Windows, available now, features user monitoring that provides administrators with real-time alerts of dangerous activities, as well as a system change auditing that creates easily-read audit trails, according to company officials. The change detection feature tracks changes made to files, directories, file shares, registry keys, and system processes.

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The upgrade was announced at the Gartner IT Security Summit held here this week.

Another new feature in Version 6.0 is NetIQ’s Trace file-based log-server technology. Trace’s features include controls that protect against tampering with log data; the ability to perform high-speed queries during incident response and investigation situations; and trend analysis and summary reporting, officials say.

Security Manager is designed to protect corporate data in distributed environments and help companies meet compliance mandates. Version 6.0, slated for release in July, is priced at $800 per managed server.