Windows Explored

I often find myself needing to track events on various user workstations when some operation takes places that triggers a specific event. In XP, this required that you be proactive and periodically check the Event Viewer logs or wait for the user to reply if they encountered the issue you are tracking. Keeping track of this across several workstations can be a little overwhelming, especially if you are tracking different issues.

A new feature of the Windows Vista and 7 Event Viewer is the ability to be notified of a specific event. To do this:

1. Connect to the workstation and go into the Event Viewer
2. Locate the event you wish to track, right-click and select Attach Task To This Event.
   
3. Assign a Name and Description to the Task.
4. When an Event Is Logged is already populated with the details of the event selected.
5. Choose to be informed via e-mail.
6. Populate the e-mail fields.

You can further modify the properties of this Task at the last step by checking the Open the Properties dialog option when you finish or at any other time by opening the Task Scheduler, where it can also be deleted when it is no longer needed.

Alternatively, you can go straight into the Task Scheduler and from the Action menu create a more detailed Task for a specific event.

The only shortcoming is that you cannot do this via the remote Event Viewer (cause sometimes I don’t want to interact with users)