Is the Shutdown Event Tracker actually being used/useful?

Question

Windows Server 2003 and 2008 have the Shutdown Event Tracker, which seems useful in theory to track why a machine was shutdown.

But in reality, I found that most IT Teams have a whole change process anyway thay defines which servers are going to be rebooted/shutdown when and why, and in case of unexpected shutdowns they log a more elaborate post mortem anyway.

I think I only ever found it useful when working late on RDP and accidentally hitting Shut Down instead of Log Off, an error that is easy to make in Windows 2003.

But I'm just wondering, is there any real-world use to it that is not already tracked through the usual IT monitoring/planning procedures?

Answer 1

In the company that i work at i manage a number of servers, personally i find the shutdown tracker quite useful for example if the machine has restarted or failed unexpectedly we add the reference number to the tracker this allow for someone else / ourselves to follow what happened and keep track of this outside of our change process.

Although the majority of the time any changes will be covered under change management...