Log Smith for Operations Manager

What is Log Smith for Operations Manager?

First of all, Log Smith can be only of use for you when you have an Operations Manager 2007 installation in your environment.

Log Smith connects to your Root Management Server (SDK Service) to gather and display events in a much more flexible way than the original Operations Console.

Log Smith is currently a very rough prototype. Please visit our forums to post your suggestions and feedback.

 

Why Log Smith for Operations Manager?

When you use Operations Manager as a logging facility for your custom applications you will soon reach the limits of the Operations Console when you need to analyze event log entries. In my experience, most application use Log4Net or standard .NET Framework functionality to dump exceptions into the event log. This makes much sense for several reasons, like reliability and speed of the windows event log. Operations Manager picks up those exceptions and stores them in the database. But then what?

The standard Operations Console has limited functionality in creating custom views or even searching for a specific string in the event description is not possible. Fortunately the SDK provides some means to do more advanced stuff like this:

The Criteria Helpers in the Ribbon are useful to compose your query:

 

 

Also not possible in the Operations Console is to search for a string in the Event Description. For example if you want to see all events containing a specific error code like this:

Log Smith provides a filter editor to compose complex filter criterias once the data is in the list. Other than that, you can also group by multiple fields: