In general, the invention facilitates diagnosing fault conditions, such as flapping, by permitting users to request information for specific components in a network device such as a router. The invention also facilitates the diagnosis of other fault conditions, including, but not limited to, excessive numbers of dropped packets, hard drive crashes, high temperature readings, and inactive interface cards. A user may obtain a targeted log containing information relating to selected fault conditions or other network device events, rather than a system log containing information relating to all network device events, some of which may not be of interest to the user. The targeted log may be parsed and analyzed with greater ease than the system log.