First published on TECHNET on Apr 01, 2008
The Event Explorer tool can be useful for functional and exploratory testing and debugging. The main purpose of this tool is to reduce burden of manual retrieving and creating EventLog related information since all necessary data regarding installed event sources is already on the machine. The tool is designed to help a user in exploring NT Eventlog sources installed on a local machine and design and fire user selected sets of events involving multiple sources with one button click. The UI enables a user to browse easily thru all sources that are registered under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog and to extrect all event information providing that path to valid message dll is stored under EventMessageFile key. It also retrives event category information if relevant keys CategoryMessageFile and CategoryCount are set. No .mc files or any support from event source creator is necessary. The user can past selected events into Execution List, change or edit Category, EntryType and insert strings for selected event or group of events and then fire them and store to XML file for future use – for example in automated test environment. The tool has potential to save a lot of time and effort by providing a user with more sophisticated selection options implemented in context menus; including SQL WHERE statements. This is especially beneficial for large event sources like e.g. MSSQLServer that has 7700 events;
Prerequisites
The tool is developed C# and requires .NET Framework 2.0 to be installed on local machine. A user has to have read access to relevant registry keys and to system directories. The tool should not be run from network share since it causes sometimes crash related to access/permission issues. Although the tool runs on Vista and Microsoft Server 2008 operating systems it does not support Crimson event sources. Also it does not allow to create new event source to fire an event.
Please read a short user's manual included in zip file before using the tool.
Contact
This is unsupported tool. While we cannot guarantee any timeline for updates and new releases we are very interested in any questions and improvement ideas that can help customers. Please send them to
zbutor@microsoft.com
EventLogExplorer.zip
