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Filter MsiInstaller installation in Event viewer


How to filter or check successful msi installation on a Windows system?

There are quite a lot of ways to filter event viewer, it will solely depend on the taste of the person doing the event viewer audit.

It can be done via PowerShell, XML query, or use command line tools and other methods which the Sys Admin feels comfortable doing.

But when it comes to auditing logs, it’s a tedious task and takes a lot of time and depends on the raw data that you have so you exactly know what you’re searching for.

Command line still a useful tool since it comes handy, you just open the command prompt window and type the command and get the output.

The hardest part is how you digest or do another filtering on the output since it might be convoluted with lots of data. But don’t depend on a single tool, make use of whatever you have on your system and other tools available on the net.

This command line below filters the MsiInstaller for event ID 1033.

wevtutil qe application /q:"*[System[Provider[@Name='MsiInstaller'] and (EventID=1033)]]" > e:\outputmsi_events.txt

What the command does is look for event id 1033 in application event viewer and look for the source of msiinstaller. See the screen shot below for details.




The friendly view details of the event viewer will give you an idea how the command is being parsed and constructed to get the query or that output that we wanted.

If you have been doing json parsing in other programming languages it’s the same logic that is used to process the parsing of the data in event viewer.



The challenge here is the amount of data in the output and how you will process it further. But if you know what you’re looking for you can just open the text file in notepad or other editor then just search for that string or data.


Here’s an example of the data but I already formatted this manually, the output of the command above will just be in a single line, one line may contain up to 1,000 or more characters in a single line.



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