ceus / eventlook

A fast & handy alternative to Windows Event Viewer

EventLook

☝️ EventLook is now available in Microsoft Store!

A fast & handy alternative to Windows Event Viewer

Overview

The inbox Windows Event Viewer is a great app that provides comprehensive functionalities in examining events. However, the user experience is not as good as I wish in some usage scenarios - for example, as the list view does not provide a preview for event messages, it would not be suitable to overview what was happening in the machine. EventLook aims to offer an alternative when you want to quickly examine Event Logs, with such UX issues addressed.

Features

• Overview events with Event Log messages
• Asynchronous event fetching for quick glance
• Provides quicker sort, specifying time range, and filters
• Supports auto refresh with new events highlighted
• Provides access to all Event Logs in local machine, including Applications and Services Logs
• Supports .evtx file (open from Explorer or drag & drop .evtx file)
• Double click to view event details in XML format
• Right click to quickly filter events
• Adjust time of events by time zone (Useful when you investigate .evtx file from different time zone)

Install

Install from Microsoft Store. Alternatively, you could download the latest artifact from Actions, unzip it, and run EventLook.exe. Settings will be saved in user.config under %LOCALAPPDATA%\EventLook. No registry is used.

Technologies

• WPF on .NET 8
• The basic structure for DataGrid with filters is based on an article in CodeProject: Multi-filtered WPF DataGrid with MVVM
• MVVM Toolkit
• Extended WPF Toolkit
• Reading event logs are done by APIs in System.Diagnostics.Eventing.Reader namespace. The API provides a unified access to logs both from the legacy Event Logging and the modern Windows Event Log infrastructure.

Contribute

We welcome your code! A standard contribution procedure is as follows:

1. Fork it to your account
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

If you have a desired feature, please let me know by opening a new issue 😉