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Utilities/programs that analyze event viewer logs

What are some good utilities or programs that analyze event viewer logs (such as the system and application logs) to discover trends and provide detailed explanations of what the different events mean?
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Alex Appleton
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I've never heard or seen of "EvLog" anywhere, this is definitely not a product that's widely in use as far as I know. The site eventid.net itself has been around for a while and does have a good database for events, but I wouldn't use their software.

GFI's event manager is a dead product that hasn't been updated in years. The latest update (after years of silence) only addressed bugs and added support for newer Microsoft Operating Systems.

Netwrix's strengths lie elsewhere, I wouldn't use them for event log monitoring.

ManageEngine is somewhat common, but their products often have an insecure design, partially because they don't use agents. It's an entry level product I wouldn't really recommend. SolarWinds has a product but it's overpriced and not worth the money IMHO.

If you're looking for something free then I would suggest Graylog, although it won't provide descriptions of events and is difficult to deploy and maintain. To be honest, most products don't have embedded explanations and you're better off searching Google for specific events you encounter. Even if a product would have some explanations, it wouldn't trust it to be complete.

I've had good results with EventSentry, it's very strong on the Windows side and reasonably priced. I believe it does make it easy to search Google once you get or view an alert from it.