If you are okay not working with syslog stuff, you could try
Enterprise Event Monitoring.  http://sourceforge.net/projects/evntmon/

This was an event monitoring tool that would use samba administrative
shares to pull the event logs and parse it into a Mysql or Postgresql
database.  It had a nice web interface with links for common event
id's.

The only problem I had with the system was the massive amounts of
data.  I was running this against 40 telecommuters at home.  It would
work for 2-3 weeks, then the database would need to be managed and I
would just blow everything away and start fresh.  After a couple of
months refreshing the database, I figured that I didn't need the data
that badly.

-- 
Jeff Rasmussen
GPG public key 0x9686C12F