I'm usually overwhelmed by the amount of tools that hosting companies provide to track & quantify traffic data and statistics. I'm equally overwhelmed by the countless flavors of malicious 'attacks' that target any and every web site known to man.

The security methods used to protect both the back and front end of a website are documented well and are straight-forward in terms of ease of implementation and application, but the army of autonomous bots knows no boundaries and will always find a niche of a website to infest.

So what can be done to handle the inevitable swarm of bots that pound your domain with brute force? Whenever I look at error logs for my domains, there are always thousands of entries that look like bots trying to sneak sql code into the database by tricking the variables in the url into giving them schema information or private data within the database.

My barbaric and time-consuming plan of defense is just to monitor visitor statistics for those obvious patterns of abuse and either ban the ips or range of ips accordingly. Aside from that, I don't know much else I could do to prevent all of the ping pong going on all day.

Are there any good tools that automatically monitor this background activity (specifically activity that throws errors on the web & db server) and proactively deal with these source(s) of mayhem?