Monday, October 20, 2014

Tail command for Windows

I have been searching for a good Tail command for windows for a while. There are some free tools out there but none really tickled my fancy until I stumbled on Log Expert today. Log Expert is a Codeplex project located here: http://logexpert.codeplex.com/

The tool allows you to browse out to a file and monitor that file for changes. Handy when you are watching a log file during a script run, monitoring your IIS logs for web traffic, or monitoring your SQL Error Log for issues. Log Expert allows you to setup highlighting rules so if you are looking for key events in the log you can easily identify them.

 I was monitoring the Windows Update process on one of our SQL Servers trying to troubleshoot what was wrong. I setup LogExpert to monitor the WindowsUpdate.log file on the server in question. I then defined a Highlighting rule to highlight all the messages in the log that contained Error or Failed. Look at this sea of red!!




So basically its just saying I cannot get to the internet on that server. Someone must have changed a setting or something. I didn't need the LogExpert to help me figure this out, but its a great tool if you miss the Tail command from Linux or if you need to monitor a log file for some reason.

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