UlsViewer released

The folks in Office Operations released the Uls Viewer tool – it allows users of SharePoint to easily view and analyze ULS logs produced by the system (though not initially designed for user consumption, people seem to have been using the logs pretty much since we shipped). This also allows users of Excel Services to gain some insight as to what’s going on inside the product as it’s running.

https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer

This is a fun moment for me – the tool was originally written by my team as we were tired of using [insert favorite text editor here]  to try and understand the logs we produced. Being the new kid on the block in Office 12, we were using the ULS with a gusto (I think we are probably still the team that use logging the most in SharePoint) and we liked the fact that we could track everything the server was doing. At some point it became too much, so we sat down and wrote a tool that would allow us to view, dice, slice, analyze and otherwise BI the heck out of our logs.

During O14, the tool was pretty much taken over by the ULS folks who have fixed many of the bugs we had in the original tool. On top of that, they thought it would be useful for users to have and asked us if we were okay with releasing it publicly. Once all the profanity was removed from the tool and some of the bugs squashed (not all of them, as you will notice in the Filter dialog box and other places), the tool was apparently deemed worthy of “shipping” under the MSDN code library.

Both my team and the ULS team are looking to fix more bugs and make the tool more efficient memory-wise – if you have any other suggestions, please be sure to let us know through the tool page above, or by commenting on this blog.