Windows 2000 Administration in a Nutshell

Name

event logs

Synopsis

Record activities of the operating system and applications for monitoring and troubleshooting purposes.

Description

An event is a specific occurrence of some activity of the Windows 2000 operating system, an installed component, or an application. Events are generated automatically and are recorded in event logs, which can then be viewed and analyzed using the Event Viewer console in Administrative tools.

Default Logs

There are three event logs that are present on every Windows 2000 computer:

System log

This log contains events generated by activities of the operating system. Examples of system events include the activities of services such as the Net- Logon service, failures of drivers to initialize properly, changes in the role of a server from member server to domain controller, and so on. System events come in three flavors:

Information events

These events simply describe a normal activity that has occurred, such as the successful startup of the Event Log service itself, the establishment of a remote-access connection, a browser forcing an election on the network, and so on. Some information events also record failures of certain activities that have no real consequence on network operations.

Warning events

These events describe an occurrence that may possibly be a problem, such as failure of dynamic registration of a DNS name due to DNS client misconfiguration, failure of the Windows Time Service to find a domain controller, space running low on a disk, a ...