Once you’ve determined your filtering needs, you finish this dialog and then ApexSQL Log will go to work, connect to the log and extracts and displays the information you’ve requested.
After this process has finished, you see the ApexSQL Log GUI in full action.
To dispel a myth that every now and then appear in SQL Server dedicated communities and which I’ve been probably guilty of having posted such an answer myself several times: You don’t need to have ApexSQL Log installed before some issues arise. It is also just fine to install it after the “accident” has happened.
Let’s have a closer look at the single parts of this main window:
The Server Explorer:
The Server Explorer is a list of previously used log with their respective servers and databases. It is organized in a tree view and once you’ve opened a log for the first time, a branch in this treeview is automatically created showing the server, the database and the log type (online, detached, or backup).
The current row panel
This panel is displaying all row data corresponding to the currently selected row in the main grid. Since you can customize this main grid to hide or show columns, you can refer to this panel when you are looking for information not shown in the main grid.