EventLog Search: A Utility App for Searching Windows Event Logs

On a number of occasions in the past few weeks, I’ve found myself wishing there was an easy way to search a machine’s event log for events that matched a string in the description.   I’ve primarily wanted such a utility while troubleshooting SCOM management packs, where I wanted to be able to filter for events with the management pack name in the description, from the Health Service Modules source, and an event ID between 21000-22000. While the native Windows EventLog provides filtering capabilities, you can’t enter a filter for the event message/description or search on a range of event IDs.   I believe there are third-party tools that let you do this, but it seemed pretty easy to whip up a Windows Forms application to provide this search functionality.   I was able to put something together in pretty short order, and it can be downloaded here.  The only requirement should be for .NET version 2, and it doesn’t have to be installed to run.   I haven’t taken the time to implement much error-handling or any documentation, but it seems to fit the bill pretty well and it should be pretty self-explanatory.

The main search window:

The event details window (double-click a row in the Data Grid View to open):