A Look at the Windows Server 2008 Event Viewer

Ryan Bass and our friends over at Enterprise Networking Planet published a closer look at the Event Viewer in Windows Server 2008 this week. Through several incarnations of Windows and Windows Server, the Event Viewer remained largely the same. It's now received an overhaul and gained some functionality in the process.

It seems strange that a tool as important as this remained virtually unchanged from the NT days. With Server 2008 and Vista, the Event Viewer has gotten a much-needed face lift. The new interface includes the ability to execute a task based on a particular event, save custom filters, get more detailed logging and forward events from one server to another.

Ryan explains how to execute a task based on the occurrence of a particular event, looks at the new types of events, and explores the new ability to forward events to another server or workstation.

In the end, he concludes that the new Event Viewer is such an improvement that some Microsoft customers might  find another Microsoft product to be redundant.

People pay thousands of dollars for Microsoft's System Center Operations manager. With the Vista/2008 Event Viewer there is now a poor man’s version. The new Event Viewer that comes with Vista and Server 2008 is a welcome improvement to the Windows OS and will no doubt make many lives much easier.