I like to keep my Windows Event Logs clean. To me, the event log should be a place to go to find errors. In fact, the only time I look at the event log is when I’m seeing errors with the system. So when programs write informational messages to the event log, I try to find some way to turn them off to prevent clutter. For instance, by default, SQL Server will write a message to the Windows Application event log every time a successful backup completes. Enabling trace flag 3226 will stop these messages.

I’ve discovered another SQL process that writes unnecessary (in my opinion) messages to the Windows application log: SSIS packages. These include maintenance plans, so even if you have enabled trace flag 3226 to stop backup messages being written to the log, if your backups are done via a maintenance plan, you will still see entries like the following:

Unfortunately, there is not currently a trace flag to disable these messages. There is, however, a registry hack.

As usual, modifying the registry can be a dangerous thing. Make a backup of your registry before modifying it. Only proceed if you know what you are doing.

That said, you can disable the SSIS message by modifying the key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\SSIS\LogPackageExecutionToEventLog to have a value of 0. A restart is not required for the change to take effect.

I should also note that we really aren’t losing any information here. The execution of the SSIS package will still be logged by SQL Server in the job history, if it is a scheduled task that runs. Any one-off SSIS executions will not be logged however, so if tracking those is important to you, do not make this change.