C# – add event log to registry

The usual cause for this would be that the machine is part of a domain and Group Policy is being pushed down and applied by something running within services.exe.

That said - you'd probably be better asking this question at serverfault.com =)

To give Network Service read permission on the EventLog/Security key (as suggested by Firenzi and royrules22) follow instructions from http://geekswithblogs.net/timh/archive/2005/10/05/56029.aspx

1. Open the Registry Editor:
   1. Select Start then Run
   2. Enter regedt32 or regedit

2. Navigate/expand to the following key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Eventlog\Security

3. Right click on this entry and select Permissions

4. Add the Network Service user

5. Give it Read permission

UPDATE: The steps above are ok on developer machines, where you do not use deployment process to install application.
However if you deploy your application to other machine(s), consider to register event log sources during installation as suggested in SailAvid's and Nicole Calinoiu's answers.

I am using PowerShell function (calling in Octopus Deploy.ps1)

function Create-EventSources() {
    $eventSources = @("MySource1","MySource2" )
    foreach ($source in $eventSources) {
            if ([System.Diagnostics.EventLog]::SourceExists($source) -eq $false) {
                [System.Diagnostics.EventLog]::CreateEventSource($source, "Application")
            }
    }
}