Does having access to a variety of valuable Exchange Server-related data sources, including the Windows event log, the system registry, Active Directory (AD), and Exchange Server message-tracking logs sound like a wish come true? Then Log Parser is the tool for you. This free Microsoft utility can quickly interrogate those data sources and output results in a variety of formats, including plain text, HTML, charts, or data that you can easily import into a Microsoft SQL Server database. Read on to find out how you can use this fast, powerful, and flexible utility to extract information about your Exchange servers' messaging traffic.
Using Log Parser
You can download the Log Parser kit from the Microsoft Web site (http:// www.microsoft.com/downloads/ details.aspx?familyid=890cd06b-abf8-4c25-91b2-f8d975cf8c07&display lang=en). The rudimentary installation procedure, which typically takes less than a minute, creates the Log Parser 2.2 directory under \program files. This directory contains all the Log Parser files, including the logparser .exe executable. If you've ever used SQL, Log Parser will be familiar. For example, to count all the messages received on the local server, I used the following command:
logparser "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM
C:\temp\server.log
WHERE [Event-ID] = 1028" -
i:W3C
This command generated the output that Figure 1 shows. All I asked Log Parser to do is to count the number of records in the log file (i.e., C:\temp\server.log) to which I pointed the utility. You can pass parameters such as c:\logs\*.log to instruct Log Parser to process all the message-tracking logs in a directory. In the previous example, Log Parser looks for records with an event ID of 1028, which is the identifier that Exchange writes into the message-tracking log when it delivers a message to a local mailbox on a server. The -i:W3C parameter tells Log Parser that the input file is in World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) format. This speedy utility can process even very large message-tracking logs in a flash: When I ran this sample command, Log Parser processed more than 1,000,000 records in 16.5 seconds. . . .
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