Read Event Log Remotely with .NET

Question

I want to read the Event Log on a remote computer to check for errors during testing. Here\'s some relevant code:

public bool CheckEventLogs(DateTime start)         


        

Answer 1

Thanks to everyone who provided comments on this question. Once I realized that the permissions might not be a part of .NET but part of Windows and the Event Viewer itself, I had some new direction for my own investigations.

It looks like a "net use" command was all that was needed to establish the connection between my local computer and the remote computer. When calling "net use" before using the code I posted in the question, things worked beautifully. It is simple enough to call that from the code before reading from the event log.

Thanks again for your help!

Answer 2

WMI is incredibly useful for this, a snippet like

SELECT Logfile,TimeGenerated,Type,SourceName,Message FROM Win32_NTLogEvent

Would allow you to query the logs. This utility from MS will allow you to explore WMI and will even build the .net code to invoke the queries.

Another benefit to this is that its going to get all the events and bring them local to the application where you can parse them at your leisure. Iterating the events in the way you are doing now is prone to failure if the connection is broken while you are processing (incidentally this is the same method that is typically employed with database access).