SharePoint provides diagnostic logging services to debug and isolate the issues within the farm. We can configure it from monitoring section in Central Administration. As part of it, we can specify the location where the trace logs will be stored. In production, it will be a good idea to keep it in a high capacity disk.
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Once logging has been in place, it will create the log files in real time, depending upon the severity of the events. We can go to the log location and find the recently updated log file to work on an existing issue in the farm.
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However, opening it up in a notepad is going to create a tough time isolating the error as it is flooded with event logs.
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To alleviate this issue, we can make use of a log viewer. There were many log viewers available for SharePoint 2013, however, not all of them are reusable with SharePoint 2016. One of the log viewers, intended for SharePoint 2013 but can be used with SharePoint 2016, is the ULS log viewer from Microsoft which can be downloaded from here. ULS stands for Unified Logging Service.![]()
Once the log viewer is installed and opened, it will ask for the log file location from which the log files should be picked up. Specify the log folder path and click on OK.
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This will load the logs into the ULS log viewer and we can easily browse through it to isolate the issues.
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We can also find the issues by severity. Clicking on the severity icons in the top menu bar will highlight the issue accordingly. Critical issues will be highlighted, as shown below. This helps to identify and pick the needed ones from the large pool of event logs.
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Summary
Thus, we saw how to use ULS log viewer to analyze the SharePoint Server 2016 trace log files.