If you are interested in centralizing events from your Windows desktops or servers then you should take a serious look at Windows Event Forwarding. Event Forwarding is provided by Windows Remote Management (WinRM) and enables you to get events from remote computers and store them in the local event log of an event collector computer.

Although Event Forwarding didn’t start shipping until Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, it is also available for Windows XP (SP2 and above) and Windows Server 2003 (SP1 and above).

Avecto have written a solution guide for setting up and configuring Event Forwarding, which is available for free download here www.avecto.com/resources.