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Three Tips for Reviewing Log Files – Microsoft’s Free Tool

By May 4, 2018September 18th, 2020Blog, Microsoft, System Center 2012
CMTrace Error Lookup screenshot

For all the systems administrators out there that use Microsoft SCCM, most will already be aware of a fantastic utility in the SCCM toolkit called CMTrace. In case you don’t have SCCM in your environment, here’s a link to download the System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager Toolkit from Microsoft.

Even if you are not using SCCM, I would highly recommend downloading the toolkit and using CMTrace for reviewing any *.log file. It really does a nice job of making log files much easier to read and review as warnings and errors are automatically highlighted.

Here’s a couple examples of non SCCM logs viewed in CMTrace.

non SCCM logs viewed in CMTrace

non SCCM logs viewed in CMTrace

Now, here are a couple of bonus features that most people never notice about CMTrace:

Highlight

CMTrace Highlight feature

CMTrace Highlight feature step 2

CMTrace Highlight feature step 3

The next gem is Filter

CMTrace filter feature for SCCM logs

CMTrace filter feature for SCCM logs step 2

CMTrace filter feature for SCCM logs step 3

The last tool in CMTrace I want to point out is the Error Lookup

CMTrace Error Lookup

CMTrace Error Lookup Step 2

CMTrace Error Lookup step 3

 

I hope that these tips can shave off a few minutes of fun reviewing logs.

Lucas Guth, PEI

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