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When investigating a problem on a Windows client, I regularly find myself looking for relevant event log entries in a pretty well defined timeframe, but with no idea which of the myriad of folders in Windows Event Viewer on the involved client I should look at. Inspecting every one of these folders in turn typically shows that the majority of them is completely empty or at least does not contain any events in the time interval I am interested in.

Is there a quick way to find out which of the Windows event logs actually contain any entries in a given time interval?

Tilman Schmidt
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  • Do you *care* which source contains the events you are looking at or *need* to use that prehistoric UI? (Try aggregated views, the [PowerShell interface](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.management/get-eventlog) or [Nir Sofers viewer](https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/full_event_log_view.html) for starters.) – anx Jun 18 '21 at 00:11
  • No, I don't care which source contains the events, nor am I in love with the, as you say, prehistoric UI. I do however need to work with standard Windows tools as the problem typically arises on user/customer systems where I cannot start by installing third party tools, so the NirSoft viewer is in most cases not an option. The PowerShell interface you reference requires specifying the LogName to inspect so it doesn't help. – Tilman Schmidt Jun 18 '21 at 00:19
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    If you can't install 3rd party tools then you're automatically limiting yourself quite a bit since Windows doesn't really offer a lot of options other than scripting. Why don't you first enumerate all the available logs and then query them? PowerShell is pretty much going to be your only option. Happy to see if I can come up with a code example if that sounds good. – Lucky Luke Jun 18 '21 at 01:47
  • That avenue sounds promising. A code example to get me started would be most welcome. – Tilman Schmidt Jun 22 '21 at 15:30

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