Fairly recently I had a discussion with one of the developers at a customer site. The discussion went something like this;
He asked "If you had the time and energy to develop the perfect tool to assist your day to day work what would that tool be?"
To which I replied "I'd like a tool that can show me everything that is happening across my MOSS farm all in one place. I'd like to see the ULS logs in realtime but integrated with the event logs. I'd want to be able to check out the status of running processes and see the farm roles and configuration, again all in one screen. I'd like ....." I could carry on forever.
Anyway a couple of days later an email arrived in my inbox telling me about this great tool and would I like to see it in action.
So I've seen it in action and I've used it in anger while monitoring a mirrored SQL failover during a DR test on a live environment.
I can't show screenshots because the data displayed in the images is sensitive for that customer but I can confirm that the dream of a Microsoft field engineer has come true. I have my perfect tool and here it is
http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointloggingspy
Still under development and already it saved me hunting through the log files across a multi server farm to locate the one server that didn't failover gracefully.
I encourage anyone involved in supporting MOSS especially if you role is troubleshooting to get this tool and use it in as many ways as you can.
Please send any feedback to the codeplex site especially if you find bugs or have new features to recommend.
Happy spying everyone