How to efficiently read Windows system logs and get only information from the last few days?

Efficient reading of Windows system logs: reverse traversal of evtx files

When using python to process windows system log files (.evtx), direct reading starts with the earliest log records. If only logs from the last few days are needed, it will cause time waste. This article will introduce how to efficiently read .evtx files in reverse and quickly obtain the required information.

The core issue is how to avoid reading line by line from the file header, thereby quickly locateing the most recent log records. The solution is to use the iterator feature of Python and combine it with the evtx library to implement reverse traversal.

The following code snippet demonstrates how to use the evtx library to read .evtx files in reverse order:

 import Evtx.Evtx as evtx

# Define the .evtx file path to read evtx_file = "path/to/file.evtx" # Please replace it with your actual file path# Open the .evtx file with evtx.Evtx(evtx_file) as log:
    # Get all records of .evtx file records = log.records()

    # Iterate the records in reverse order and output each record for record in reversed(records):
        # output record XML representation print(record.xml())

This code first imports the evtx library and then specifies the path to the .evtx file (be sure to replace it with your actual file path). Then it opens the .evtx file, gets all records, and iterates over the records in reverse using the reversed() function. Finally, it prints out the xml representation of each record. Through the reversed() function, the code starts iterating directly from the end of the record, thus avoiding unnecessary forward traversal, improving reading efficiency, and meeting the need to read only the latest log. It should be noted that path/to/file.evtx is just an example path, you need to replace it with your actual .evtx file path.

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