Lee Markum has two ways to read the SQL Server error log:
Reading the SQL Server Error Log is important when troubleshooting many issues for SQL Server. Some example issues would be errors related to Always On Availability Groups, long IO occurrence messages, and login failures.
Unfortunately, the SQL Server Error Log can be very full of information, making specific things hard to find, especially if you’re just visually scrolling the Error Log. Even if you’re recycling the Error Log each day and keeping 30 or more days of error log, on a busy system, the error log can still be quite full, even for a single day.
Click through for those techniques.