The windows event log

As an introduction to windows event logging I recommend reading the following article: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Using Event Logs. It's the first interesting one I've found after googling for an introduction.

Quoting the article, which also talks about EventCombMT.exe which we'll mention later:

This article reviews best practices for working with Windows event logs including how to interpret 
event messages, how to configure event logs, how to search and filter events, how to view events on 
remote systems, and how to use EventCombMT.exe and other tools to monitor events on multiple systems.