Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Microsoft Log Parser Toolkit

Microsoft Log Parser Toolkit

"It's out now :) Microsoft Log Parser Toolkit ! get it at major online bookstores. You will be amazed by how powerful and flexible this tiny parser can do, it will parse almost any log that you can find in Windows OS. It is a must have tool for Windows sysadmin. ..."

Wow... A book on Log Parser? That's... interesting...

Some of my past posts on Log Parser:
Log Parser 2.2
Unofficial Log Parser Support Site

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does the log parser do more than awk, sed, uniq, sort and grep?
I should check it out... I wonder if it's another 5000-line, 20-click program to replace a single Unix pipe.

Anonymous said...

Okay, it's not so bad. No clicks ... it's cmdline.

I don't see an ability to change stuff though ... to transform page A to page B so log analysis can combine the two pages (sometimes this is needed).

Greg said...

One of the nice things about Log Parser is that it is a command line app... But also has a COM interface so can be easily automated.

The main cool thing is that is has a built in query engine. So you can use SQL like commands against all the supported file formats.

Think executing SQL queries (with both SELECT and WHERE support) against a file system... Or IIS logs, CVS files, etc. All within/native to this utility.

Makes it very flexible, without being to hard to understand.

I can't say if it's better than awk, sed, grep, etc... I know some guys that could knock out a command string with those faster than it's taking me to write this. But it would be a very focused usage item (which sometimes is not a bad thing). But also probably not as easy to modify later when something changes...

Like most things, it all depends on what you're used to and comfortable with I guess.