Logging has become a fundamental feature within the modern computer operating systems because of the fact that logging may be used through a variety of applications and fashion, such as system tuning, auditing, and intrusion detection systems. Syslog daemon is the logging implementation in Unix/Linux platforms, while Windows Event Log is the logging implementation in Microsoft Windows platforms. These logging implementations provide application program interfaces that, in turn, simplify logging functions from data collection to data storage. In this paper, we survey Unix, Linux, and Windows logging mechanisms and introduce their security issues. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.