Logs are data accumulated during the operation of application and system programs. As a rule, they contain service information regarding emergency situations and failures. Therefore, it is often necessary to look at the saved logs to identify the causes of failures in the operation of applications and subsystems.
Necessary
administrative rights on the local machine
Instructions
Step 1
Look at the logs saved in the Windows event log. Start the MMC console. To do this, right-click on the "My Computer" icon located on the desktop and select "Manage …" in the context menu that appears. You can also open the "Control Panel" folder using the appropriate item in the "Settings" section of the "Start" menu. Next, you need to go to the "Administration" folder using the shortcut of the same name, and then open "Computer Management".
In the left pane of the window that appears, expand the "Utilities" and "Event Viewer" items in sequence. Highlight one of the nested items. Logs of the selected section will be displayed in the right part of the window. To obtain detailed information on an individual element, double-click on it with the mouse.
Step 2
View the logs stored in the external Windows log file. If necessary, open the Computer Management window as described in the first step. In the left pane, expand the Utilities item. Expand and highlight Event Viewer. Click on it with the right mouse button or open the "Action" section of the main menu. Click on the "Open log file" item.
In the dialog that appears, navigate to the directory where the Windows event log file is located. Highlight it in the listing. In the "Log type" drop-down list, select one of the elements ("Security", "Application", "System"). Change the name in the Display Name text box, if necessary. Click the "Open" button. View the loaded log by highlighting the added item in the left pane of the window.
Step 3
Find one of the system log files maintained by the syslogd service on Linux or FreeBSD operating systems. Change to the / etc directory and open the syslog.conf file in a viewer (this in most cases requires access with adm or root user rights). Analyze the contents of the file. Find out the paths to the log files where the messages of the subsystems and services you are interested in are added to.
Step 4
View the saved logs in Linux or FreeBSD operating systems. Open the files you defined in the previous step in a viewer. This will most likely require the authority of the adm or root group. You can also use the tail command to print the last few lines of logs to the console. For example:
tail -n 15 / var / log / messages
This command is very convenient to use to quickly view the latest events added to the log.
