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Recipe 6.10 Watching the Event Log for a Specific Entry

Problem

You may have multiple applications that write to a single event log. For each of these applications, you want a monitoring application to watch for one or more specific log entries to be written to the event log. For example, you might want to watch for a log entry that indicates that an application encountered a critical error or shut down unexpectedly. These log entries should be reported in real time.

Solution

Monitoring an event log for a specific entry requires the following steps:

Create the following method to set up the event handler to handle event log writes:

public void WatchForAppEvent(EventLog log)
{
    log.EnableRaisingEvents = true;
    log.EntryWritten += new EntryWrittenEventHandler(OnEntryWritten);
}

Create the event handler to examine the log entries and determine whether further action is to be performed. For example:

public static void OnEntryWritten(object source, 
                                  EntryWrittenEventArgs entryArg) 
{
    if (entryArg.Entry.EntryType == EventLogEntryType.Error)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(entryArg.Entry.Message);
        Console.WriteLine(entryArg.Entry.Category);
        Console.WriteLine(entryArg.Entry.EntryType.ToString( ));
        // Do further actions here as necessary...
    }
}

Discussion

This recipe revolves around the EntryWrittenEventHandler delegate, which calls back a method whenever any new entry is written to the event log. The EntryWrittenEventHandler delegate accepts two arguments: a source of type object and an entryArg of type EntryWrittenEventArgs. The entryArg parameter is the most interesting of the two. It contains a property called Entry that returns an EventLogEntry object. This EventLogEntry object contains all the information you need concerning the entry that was written to the event log.

This event log that we are watching is passed as the WatchForAppEvent method's log parameter. This method performs two actions. First, it sets log's EnableRaisingEvents property to true. If this property were set to false, no events would be raised for this event log when an entry is written to it. The second action this method performs is to add the OnEntryWritten callback method to the list of event handlers for this event log.

To prevent this delegate from calling the OnEntryWritten callback method, you can set the EnableRaisingEvents property to false, effectively turning off the delegate.

Note that the Entry object returned by the entryArg parameter of the OnEntryWritten callback method is read-only and therefore the entry cannot be modified before it is written to the event log.

Recipe 6.10 Watching the Event Log for a Specific Entry

Problem

Solution

Discussion

See Also