Event Viewer - Windows Vista

Windows Vista

Event Viewer consists of a rewritten event tracing and logging architecture on Windows Vista. It has been rewritten around a structured XML log-format and a designated log type to allow applications to more precisely log events and to help make it easier for support technicians and developers to interpret the events. The XML representation of the event can be viewed on the Details tab in an event's properties. It is also possible to view all potential events, their structures, registered event publishers and their configuration using the wevtutil utility, even before the events are fired. There are a large number of different types of event logs including Administrative, Operational, Analytic, and Debug log types. Selecting the Application Logs node in the Scope pane reveals numerous new subcategorized event logs, including many labeled as diagnostic logs. Analytic and Debug events which are high frequency are directly saved into a trace file while Admin and Operational events are infrequent enough to allow additional processing without affecting system performance, so they are delivered to the Event Log service. Events are published asynchronously to reduce the performance impact on the event publishing application. Event attributes are also much more detailed and show EventID, Level, Task, Opcode, and Keywords properties.

Users can filter event logs by one or more criteria or by a limited XPath 1.0 expression, and custom views can be created for one or more events. Using XPath as the query language allows viewing logs related only to a certain subsystem or an issue with only a certain component, archiving select events and sending traces on the fly to support technicians.