Kenneth Fisher shows us where error logs are located and how to read them outside of SQL Server:
Quick and easy post today. Hopefully you’ve opened the error log on a SQL instance. However, what happens if you don’t have the log viewer in SSMS? In fact, the instance won’t come up at all so you really need to see what went wrong.
Fortunately, the error logs in SQL are just text files, even though they don’t actually have that extension. The trick is knowing where they are.
Read on for the answer.