Extract text from Event trace logs (ETL)
To convert ETL Log files to another format, you need Windows Event Viewer or other System software.
To convert other file formats to the "Windows Event Trace Log" file type, you need software like Windows Event Viewer or a similar tool.
An .etl file is a binary Event Trace Log file created by Microsoft Windows. The Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) system generates these logs to track operating system performance, application errors, and network diagnostics at a deep kernel level.
You can natively open these files using Windows Event Viewer or the Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA). Built-in command-line tools like tracerpt.exe are also commonly used to process them.
Users frequently struggle with .etl files because they are proprietary binary files, not standard plain text logs. If you open an .etl file in a standard text editor, it displays unreadable, scrambled characters. Furthermore, these files capture high-frequency data and quickly grow to massive sizes, sometimes exceeding several gigabytes. This makes them extremely difficult to share, analyze, or parse on non-Windows systems.
To make the data usable, you must convert .etl files to standard formats like CSV (Comma-Separated Values), XML, or TXT. This allows the raw diagnostic data to be imported into third-party analytics platforms, Excel, or cross-platform log readers. Converting to EVTX is also useful when sharing logs with other Windows administrators.
Because this is a closed, highly optimized binary format, standard online converters often fail to process it. Usually, only the original Windows operating system tools can properly decode the proprietary event structures. Our tool will inspect the file structure, extract raw internal text strings, and show metadata. If we detect supported embedded data, partial viewing or conversion may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your ETL file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted EML, ELT, CAB, EVTX, TXT, LOG, 001, ET, ZIP, BAK, TMP, REG and PDF files.
If you want to convert ETL file to PCAP, TEXT, CSV, CAP, SYS, DLL, EXE, DRV, VXD, 386, COM or BAT, you can use Windows Event Viewer or similar software from the "System Performance Tracing" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert MSI, EXE, REG, MST, LNK, CAB, CAT, DRV, INF, SYS, MSU or DLL files to ETL, try Windows Event Viewer or another comparable tool in the "System Performance Tracing" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our ETL converter.