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I just spent a fair amount of time troubleshooting an issue that required me to look in the ULS logs for the root cause. What tools are recommended for searching/filtering/reading ULS logs?

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We can compare features and vote for favourites based on our experience. If James suggests the ULSViewer (which I also use), I'm likely to give his experience a lot of consideration. – Neil Richards Apr 8 '11 at 21:50
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8 Answers

up vote 11 down vote

If you are looking to dive deep and investigate all facets of the issue, including the ULS, IIS, event logs and even performance logs, you might want to look into the SharePoint Diagnostics (SPDiag) tool that is part of SharePoint Administration Toolkit, a free tool from Microsoft.

This compiles all of the logs from all servers across the farm lets you get a bird's eye view of what was going on at the given time.

It does take a few steps to set up but really can help troubleshoot an issue.

Documentation can be found on TechNet.

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Does it work with Sharepoint 2010? – moontear Apr 9 '11 at 9:06
There is no mention of SP2010 in the "question", but a new version just arrived so i updated Daves answer with new urls – Anders Rask♦ May 4 '11 at 6:34
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up vote 8 down vote

UlsViewer is a no brainer, you got to have it. But for debugging realtime on several web front end servers I still prefer SPTraceView by Hristo Pavlov.

This unique tool lets you watch ULS errors as they occur from multiple WFE. You install it on all WFE and one is chosen as receiver. This way you can monitor behaviour even though you dont know what WFE your users are having errors with.

It only supports MOSS currently.

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That is a brilliant little tool. – NLV Apr 11 '11 at 9:04
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up vote 4 down vote

ULS Log Reader from SPSDev: http://www.spsdev.com/UlsReader.aspx.

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up vote 4 down vote

Also have a look at http://spcorrelationviewwp.codeplex.com/ which allows you to retrieve the information recorded in the ULS log tagged with a specific correlation ID without leaving your site since it's a webpart.

enter image description here

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up vote 3 down vote

Stefan Gordon's ULS Viewer

enter image description here

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Check out the original ULSViewer. It wins by far again Stefan Gordon's tool. – moontear Apr 9 '11 at 9:04
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up vote 2 down vote

Try SharePoint Log Reader on codeplex. The ability to filter on category and correlation id is great. Its a WPF application.

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up vote 2 down vote

The Merge-SPLogFile cmdlet is invaluable when working in a multi server farm environment. It collects the log files from all servers into a single local file. It supports basic filtering to reduce the size of the log file that is collected.

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