Windows Event Viewer can be an extremely useful tool, especially for obtaining more information about why a program may have had to close unexpectedly.

There are numerous different logs, we are going to focus on the Windows Application log as this records events logged by software.

Event Viewer is split into 4 panes, the left pane is the Event Viewer Tree View, the centre section contains the Event pane at the top and the Preview pane (this can be turned on or off in the View drop-down menu) on the bottom and the right-hand section this the Actions pane.

Opening Event Viewer

Press Windows key + R to open a run window, type eventvwr and click enter.

To view event details

From the left-hand pane, drill down into Windows Logs and select the Application log, this will bring up a list of events in the Event Pane. Further details around these events can be found in the preview pane or by double-clicking on the event to open the Event Properties window.

Ways of finding events of interest

The Level column in the easy way of spotting events of interest as this categorises the type of event, we are mainly interested in Error events (the other types are Warning (which are worth examining in the absence of Errors), Information, Critical, Success Audit and Failure Audit).

The Date and Time column is also useful if the user has specified an accurate time as to when an application may have occurred.

The Source column allows you to quickly identify to which application an event relates.

Search & Filter Options

Click Find in the Actions pane, this allows you to search the log for keywords.

Click Filter in the Action pane, this allows you to narrow down the Events by Date\Time, Level, Keywords, user etc.

Interpreting events

The large text box at the top of the event (when opened or previewed) is likely to hold the information on that may help us better understand the reason for the crash.

The amount and usefulness of information returned vary depending on the nature of the problem. If it is not immediately obvious what is causing the errors then the next step would be to search our self-service areas (Ask Sage, Known Issues Online and Incident Manager) and perform internet searches using any salient parts of the error.

The bottom section of the log contains other potentially useful information such as User (further information on these fields can be found in Event Viewer Help Files).