How to configure Windows Event Log Forwarding

In a small and medium level business your budged will not allow you to buy and run a dedicated event reader. Since these days business depend on multiple servers and services its not easy for a system administrator to read all the events separately  on the servers. 

For this kind of situations Microsoft introduced Event Forwarding. Event Forwarding allows administrators to get events from remote computers, also called source computers or forwarding computers and store them on a central server; the collector computer.

Events can be transferred from the forwarding computers to the collector computer in one of two ways:

Collector initiated – Using this method, the collector will contact the source computers (clients) and ask them for any events they might have. The minimum operating system level required on the source computers is Windows XP SP2 with minimum Windows Remote Management 1.1 installed.

Source initiated – By using this method the clients or forwarders transfer events to the collector as required. Systems like Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008/R2 and Windows Server 2012/R2 can be Event Collectors, but this feature is not supported for down-level operating systems. Even tough there are no limitations when a client operating system is used as an Event Collector, a server platform is recommended since will scale much better in high volume scenarios.

(http://www.vkernel.ro/blog/how-to-configure-windows-event-log-forwarding)

Configuring event forwarding collector initiated subscriptions ( Step by Steps ) 

Let’s start by enabling WinRM on the Event Forwarders machines (the clients); and we have two choices here: we either use Group Policy to enable WinRM or we do it manually by issuing the bellow command on a client by client basis:

In my Example i have used WIN2K12MAIL as client.

winrm qc

If your clients are running Windows server 2012 and above, WinRM it’s enabled by default on them, but just to be sure, you can check the configuration using the bellow command line:

winrm get winrm/config

Now that WinRM it’s enabled on all our Event Forwarder computers
Now we have to configure Collector computer rights to read the logs from this computers
We can use the Event Collector computer account itself for authentication, or we can create a user account in Active Directory and use that
I have created an account called eventforwarder and added this to the default Event Log Readers Group.
Creating new user eventforwarder 
 

Adding eventforwarder to default Event Log Readers Group




The next step is to enable and start the event collector service on the collector machine, so i have logged in to WIN2k12DC server and issue the bellow command:



wecutil qc



Continue and if its Success let’s move forward and create a subscription on the collector computer which “tells” this one for what type of event logs to look for and collect from the forwarder computers
GO to Event Viewer and Right click on Subscription, Create new Subscription

Now click the Collector initiated radio button then hit Select Computers to add the source computers/forwarders from which the collector will pull the events

Now we have to select what events we wants to receive, so click on  Select Events button

The last step to make this work is to configure the account used by the collector machine to connect to clients. We already added this account to the local Event Log Readers group on every forwarder, so we should not have access problems.
Click the Specific User button, provide the account and credentials and click OK, then move down to the Event Delivery Optimization section where we have three options:
Normal This option ensures reliable delivery of events and does not attempt to conserve bandwidth.It gets the events every 15 minutes by using a pull delivery mode.
Minimize Bandwidth – This option ensures that the use of network bandwidth for event delivery is strictly controlled.
It uses push delivery mode and it uses a heartbeat interval of 6 hours.
Minimize Latency – This option ensures that events are delivered with minimal delay. It is an appropriate choice if you are collecting alerts or critical events. It uses push delivery mode every of 30 seconds.
I have done this way but it didn't work, Access Denied , So i have changed the User access to 
Administrator and it worked ..
Didn't work 

The one worked 

Now i can see the Forwarder is been added 

After ~10 minutes or less, depending on how you configured the Event Delivery Optimization options, logs should start coming in


That is all. Its working ...