Event Log Manager software for Windows 11 and Windows Server

If you are looking for good free software to view, manage and analyze your Windows Event Logs, you may want to check out these three – Event Log Manager, Event Log Explorer and Lepide Event Log Manager.

Event Log Management refers to the comprehensive process of consolidation of network-wide generated event logs in a central repository, archiving of current and historical event logs to keep them readily available for future reference, event log filtration for requirement-centric browsing and report generation to ensure comprehensive event log tracking and identify critical events.

Event logs are a crucial source of details required to avoid security threats, legal hassles, network breaches, and system damage. Therefore, they need to be tracked and managed.

Depending on the organization and network size, event log management may become more challenging as well as demanding for the network administrator. For example, event logs indicating any login failure may have many aspects, such as it may be just a simple logon failure or an attempt towards unauthorized access of organizational data or information theft. In such a situation, event logs need to be managed to decide on the actual threat so that required ones can be browsed and accessed whenever required. This is just a glimpse; have a look at these requirements to understand the significance of event log management:

An administrator needs to stay informed about critical events to identify activities affecting system health and security and take immediate action.
There are times when any forensic investigation may require historical event logs immediately. In the absence of an effective event log management system, this is not possible on such short notice.
In organizations where customers’ confidential details or credit card details are kept or processed, checking event logs may help to avoid fraudulent activity.
For system troubleshooting, the administrator may require event logs to identify the process or activity that caused the problem. Well-managed event logs help the administrator reduce the detection time and resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Any organization cannot compromise on compliance upholding. Event log management ensures compliance by fulfilling all auditing and event log retention requirements defined by various regulatory bodies. Moreover, comprehensive reports generated on HIPPA, GLBA, PCI, FISMA, and SOX compliance help ensure the fulfillment of these regulations.

Working with event logs usually becomes a tedious errand for most. In most cases, it is such chaos that system admins wish they could avoid tracking events. It is considered cumbersome, tiring, and painstaking to search among zillions of logs using the event viewer and shuffle among systems one by one to ensure complete security.

Event Log Manager software for Windows

1] Netwrix Event Log Manager

It is a free event log consolidation, alerting and archiving tool, that allows you to collect events logs from multiple computers across the network, alert on most critical events, and centrally store all events in a compressed format, enabling convenient analysis archived event log data. The free version supports up to 10 servers. Get it here.

Features and benefits:

Event Log Archiving
Event Log Consolidation
Real-Time Alerting
Web-based Reporting
Includes predefined reports for regulatory compliance.

2] Event Log Explorer

It is an effective software solution for viewing, monitoring and analyzing events recorded in Security, System, Application and another log of Microsoft Windows operating systems. Event Log Explorer greatly extends standard Windows Event Viewer monitoring functionality and brings many new features. It is free for personal use. Get it here. The Home license is free.

Main features and benefits:

Multiple-document or tabbed-document user interface depending on user preferences
Favorites computers and their logs are grouped into a tree
Manual and automatic backup of event logs
Event descriptions and binary data are in the log window
Advanced filtering by any criteria including event description text
Quick Filter feature allows you to filter event log in a couple of mouse clicks
Log loading options to pre-filter event logs
Fast navigation between events with bookmarks
Compatibility with well-known event knowledgebases
Color coding by Event ID
Print and export to different formats
Export log to different formats.

3] Lepide Event Log Manager

Lepide Event Log Manager (LELM) collects network-wide events and presents them easily to simplify log comprehension and compliance settlement. It offers a freeware version as well as a paid enterprise version. The freeware version collects Windows event logs from a range of systems, identifies them, and also generates alerts for critical events with partial information. It helps sort, filter, save, delete, and refresh events on a centralized platform.

Features of the software:

Built-in comprehensive reports for regulatory compliance.
Real-time alerts to notify Administrators of critical events.
Centralize platform to collect, browse and view network-wide event logs.
Out-of-the-box reports covering all aspects of Windows event log reporting.
Allows you to analyze event patterns to get fore-warning on possible system crash to ensure high uptime.
Gives a significant advantage over native Windows event viewers as it not only allows you to view but also manage event logs.

Limitations of Freeware version

The Freeware version of Lepide Event Log Manager is completely free and allows you to avail of its features without paying any license fee. However, the free version comes with certain limitations: