Write Better Logging

Are you leveraging logging to it’s full potential? If you answered “no”, I invite you to join me as we explore the Windows Event Viewer, and how you can leverage it to provide a “Single Pane of Glass” experience when reviewing code deployed in your enterprise.

Writing Better Logging

The Windows Event Viewer provides many great features that are included with EVERY copy of Windows. Most applicable to this session are: - Event Forwarders - Event Subscriptions - Custom Event Sources/Error ID’s

Using the built-in Event cmdlets, you can take your logging from flat files, csv, databases, etc, and begin to centralize all of that information. In this session we will discuss creating custom event sources, so you know exactly where the error came from, and custom error ID’s, so you can filter on specifics. We will then discover how to create Event Forwarders and Subscriptions, which enable you to ship all of your logging information to a single server for review. This session will empower you to streamline logging information and provide a framework to extend this information into other metric tools such as Splunk, Grafana, ELK, etc.

I’m very often frustrated with examples online, or seeing people log information to txt files, csv, or other means. Windows provides a great built-in method to collect logging information, which frankly I feel is quite often overlooked. Hopefully this presentation changes the dynamic, and empowers fellow IT professionals to Write Better Logging.