ULSViewer is one of the tools that is in every admin’s SharePoint Toolbox. For those who don’t know, ULSViewer was stored on Microsofts’ MSDN Archive Gallery website that was recently taken down. It was the best tool to view SharePoint ULS Logs!
Even though it is unnofficially available for download over here we don’t know for how long it will be!
What would be the best replacement for ULSViewer incase Microsoft decides to never bring it back officially?
While not a full replacement, I’m a huge fan of the SharePoint Diagnostic Toolkit (SPDiag). Its built-in ULS viewer only displays “issues”, but it’s near-real-time (delayed by about 10-15 mins depending on how often SharePoint exports its diagnostic info to the Health & Usage database) and has very powerful filtering, search and drill-down:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh144782(v=office.14).aspx
Note that it does work about 95% with SharePoint 2013 as well, although it does require you to jump through a few hoops e.g. if you’re using a SQL alias in your farm etc.
Brian
I’m interested in seeing what others use for viewing the ULS Logs and what others will use to replace the ULS Viewer if at all.
I published an article a few weeks ago about the ULSViewer which also includes alternatives after speaking with Brian about the ULSViewer being archived on Twitter – http://www.jcallaghan.com/2014/05/sharepoint-uls-viewer/.
My colleague uses baregrep a lot for searching and filtering the logs from ULS, even in realtime. http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baregrep/ Just as an alternative. On the other hand, ULS Viewer is special. It is dedicated for ULS Logs and I like it more for debugging SharePoint…
