Professional Windows® PowerShell

22.1. Event Log Basics

If you have spent any significant time working with Windows machines, you will likely have spent at least some time monitoring the behavior of applications on one or more machines and checked what errors are logged in time association with system or application malfunction. The GUI tool to support viewing of events is the Event Viewer. To launch Event Viewer, select StartAdministrative ToolsEvent Viewer. Figure 22-1 shows the Event Viewer as seen on a Windows XP machine with Windows PowerShell installed. Depending on installed software, you may see additional logs displayed in Event Viewer.

NOTE

If you had prerelease versions of Windows PowerShell installed, you may see other logs that use the term PowerShell or Monad. If you install the final release of Windows PowerShell 1.0 on a machine with no previous installation, the Windows PowerShell log is used. If you installed Release Candidate 2, the PowerShell log is used and the Windows PowerShell log is ignored.

Figure 22.1. Figure 22-1

The Application, Security and System logs are routinely present on Windows XP and Windows 2003 machines.

To view the properties of a specified log, select it the left pane of ...