There is a Windows tracking tool that is not easy to find its path but is very easy to read and helpful. It is Reliability Monitor or Reliability Monitor.
Of course, although the Windows Event log is without a doubt the main tool to learn more about the errors and their causes, it is not the only one. The Reliability Monitor can make a difference to those who want something more graphic and easy to use.
Windows Reliability Monitor highlights a series of successful and failed actions and classifies them as critical, warning, or informational events.
To make things even simpler, it highlights all three events in the timeline that appears at the beginning, so you can see at a glance what needs your attention and what not.
- Critical: These events include application and Windows crashes. For example, when a application stopped working, when a Windows component returned an error, or when a piece of hardware failed.
- Warnings: These are the warning messages, for example, when an update was not installed or an application could be installed or upgraded.
- Informative: This is a list of successful events, for example, the successful installation of Windows updates.
A click on a day in the time bar shows all the events for that day. So you can choose which days you want to see based on the icons in the time bar and then search for the critical events and after the warnings.
Some are pretty easy to ignore, for example, failed upgrades of Windows that were successful in the second attempt. Frequent failures of an application fall into this category, especially if you use the program regularly.
Each event is listed by its name, summary, time and date, and a suggested action. For example, you can see that Firefox has stopped working for a specific date, and that you can use some action to find an online solution.
In addition, you have the possibility to see a deeper analysis of the error, by pressing the link "View technical details" which contains additional information. They can reveal to you, for example, a code error that you can use to investigate better issue.
You can then use the error code or description for it resolution of the issue. For example, you can run an internet search to learn more about it.
How to Start Reliability Surveillance
There are many ways to start Windows Reliability. The following method works on all supported versions of Windows (which means from Vista and above).
- Press the Windows and R keys together to open the run window.
- Enter: perfmon / rel
- Press enter.
