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The Event Viewer is an application that enables you to browse and manage event logs. Event logs are special files that record significant events on your computer, such as when a user logs on to the computer or when a program encounters an error. Whenever one of these types of events occur, the system records the event in an event log that you can read by using Event Viewer. The Event Viewer is an indispensable tool for monitoring the health of systems and troubleshooting issues when they arise.
Event Viewer has been around since the days of Windows NT, but has not changed much, up to the arrival of Windows Vista (and Windows Server 2008). In Windows Vista, Event Viewer enables an administrator to perform the following tasks:
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Note: Windows Event Viewer is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that can be easily added to a custom MMC window. You can open it manually by typing eventvwr.msc in the Run command.
Note: Along with the new Event Viewer, Vista also introduced the Reliability Monitor, a part of the Performance console found in Computer Management or as a stand-alone snap-in. Monitoring the system’s stability with the Reliability Monitor makes it easier for the administrators to visually see the stability rating for the system, and allows them to quickly see what caused the lack of stability. Read more about it in my “Using the Reliability Monitor in Windows Vista” article.
Besides re-designing the interface, the infrastructure that underlies event logging has also been re-written in Windows Vista. Information about each event conforms to an XML schema, and you can access the XML representing a given event.
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Like in previous Windows versions, Event Viewer tracks information in several different logs. But unlike pre-Vista operating systems, the Vista Event Viewer has more flexibility in the log types and in the way it displays them. Windows Vista Logs include:
Note: You must be logged on as an administrator to use Event Viewer’s full capabilities.
To run Event Viewer:
When viewing an event log, you can filter the events being displayed. Like in previous Windows versions, event filtering is temporary by design, meaning you filter for something, then when you close Event Viewer, the filter is no longer applied. You can also remove an applied filter. However, unlike previous OSs, if you create a useful filter that you want to reuse, you can save it as a custom view.
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You can read more about Filtering and Custom Views in my upcoming “Working with Filtering and Custom Views in the Vista Event Viewer” article.
With the new Vista Event Viewer, you can customize how events are displayed by configuring the order in which properties appear in the details pane.
To change the order of event properties:
You can view all events that share the same value for any given event property. For example, you can view all the events that originated from the same source or all the Warning level events. You can sort events by property, but the resulting groupings might be large and difficult to navigate. If you run into that limit with sorting, you can instead use the grouping feature of Event Viewer. When you group events, a descriptive heading appears in the list control above each group. Although all members of all groups are visible by default, you can collapse and expand each distinct group by double-clicking the corresponding group heading.
To group events according to a given property:
Another of Vista’s new Event Viewer improvements is the ability to configure a task to run when a specific event logged.
You can read more about assigning tasks to events in my “Assigning Custom Tasks to Events in Vista” article.
Vista’s new Event Viewer comes as a big improvement over previous versions. The various ways in which you can display, work with and place conditions on events is a real benefit for administrators, and although the new interface is quite different than what we were used to in pre-Vista OSs, getting used to it is quite easy.
Events And Errors Message Center: Advanced Search
Got a question? Post it on our Windows Vista Forums!
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