The event logs are the first place to check when something goes wrong on a Windows machine. But even more important is keeping a constant eye on the event logs to make sure that you will be informed immediately about problems coming up. The Event Viewer that comes with Windows can only be used for the first purpose. If you want to keep yourself up-to-date about what is going on in your Windows network, you need a third party utility. EventSentry Light from NETIKUS.NET is a great a tool that does just that, and it is free like in beer.

The name would already let you guess that there is also a commercial version. Please, check out this comparison table regarding the differences between the two editions. This review is about EvenSentry Light. Before you try this tool, you should have a general idea of how EventSentry Light works. Even though it is free, its many options might confuse you when you just want to have a quick look at it to see if it suits your needs. This post will give you a first idea about it. I will only scratch the surface of this sophisticated tool, though.

If you are really interested in trying it, I recommend watching at least the first 15 minutes of this screencast about EventSentry. It will also give you an idea about its free version. There are more screencasts which I also recommend if you want to dig deeper. This is a much faster and convenient way of learning than poring over the manual.

Basically, EventSentry Light works like a central filter to extract important information from all your event logs. It collects data from the event logs, extracts the information that is relevant to you and notifies you about them. The data is collected by the EventSentry agent that can be easily deployed using the management console. The agent uses filters where you can specify what event entries interest you.

These filters are grouped in packages which can be assigned to computers individually or to computer groups via the management console of EventSentry Light. One major limitation of the free version is that you can only work with one package and two computer groups. Basically, this limitation means that you will have to use the same filters on your machines. However, a package can contain multiple filters.

Once the data is collected, the information can be forwarded to you as e-mail or as pop-up message on your desktop. The light version only supports these two notification methods. Note that the full version supports 512 different actions.

EventSentry Light goes beyond the average event log management tool since it also has a couple of other monitoring capabilities. For example, it supports environment monitoring (temperature, motion etc.), third party log file monitoring, and system health checks. With the latter feature, you can monitor the availability of Windows services or processes, performance, disk space, and more. EventSentry Light also has basic network monitoring capabilities using pings and TCP connections.

Note: You might have noticed that NETIKUS.NET is a 4sysops sponsor. This is not a paid post, though. I wouldn’t have reviewed EventSentry Light if I didn’t like the tool.

EventSentry Light

Rate this tool: (9 votes, average: 4.78 out of 5)

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