How to tell what time a Windows user logged in?

This question was posted on ServerFault, so I decided to spend some time answering based on my experiences querying this data in the past. The answer depends on what Windows platform the user is logging into. For Windows 2000/XP/2003 event id 528 with logon type 2 will show you interactive logons from a local or domain account. LogParser is a great tool to parse the event logs from a large number of machines and supports a large number of outputs. So for example you could use the following to query the security log on a remote machine and output to a tab separated file:

c:> logparser.exe "select TimeGenerated, SID from \\wksname\Security where EventID = 528" -i EVT -resolveSIDs:ON -q:ON -headers:off -o:TSV >> c:\UserLogons.txt

Querying events from the Security logs on Windows Vista/2008/7 is slightly different in that the log file format has changed, as well as the event ids. Event id 4624 with logon type 2 will show successful interactive logins. We can use the wevtutil to query for similar data and output it in XML format:

c:> wevtutil qe Security /q:"*[System[Provider[@Name='Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing'] and Task=12544 and (EventID=4624)] and EventData[Data[@Name='LogonType']='2']]" /e:Events > c:\UserLogons.xml


So what about all thos 540 event id's appearing in your Security event logs?

Event 540 gets logged for a few different reasons. So for example you could see event id 540 with logon type 3 when a shared resource is accessed by the server service. Here are the logon types for this event id provided by Microsoft:

• 2 Interactive A user logged on to this computer at the console.
• 3 Network A user or computer logged on to this computer from the network.
• 4 Batch Batch logon type is used by batch servers, where processes might run on behalf of a user without the user's direct intervention.
• 5 Service A service was started by the Service Control Manager.
• 7 Unlock This workstation was unlocked.
• 8 NetworkCleartext A user logged on to a network. The user's password was passed to the authentication package in its unhashed form. The built-in authentication packages all hash credentials before sending them across the network. The credentials do not traverse the network in plaintext (also called cleartext).
• 9 NewCredentials A caller cloned its current token and specified new credentials for outbound connections. The new logon session has the same local identity, but it uses different credentials for other network connections.
• 10 RemoteInteractive A user logged on to this computer remotely using Terminal Services or a Remote Desktop connection.
• 11 CachedInteractive A user logged on to this computer with network credentials that were stored locally on the computer. The domain controller was not contacted to verify the credentials.

Happy hunting.