Thursday, February 21, 2008

Diagnostic Tools in OCS

Daily, I'll spend some time in discussion and newsgroups to see if I can help people drill down their environment to see how we can resolve some issues/problems. 

There are very good newsgroups on OCS/LCS. Spend some time to click around and summit questions if you have. Very frequently there are some guy’s answering these questions. Some guy would be me of course.

TechNet Discussion Groups on OCS

TechNet Discussion Groups on MOC

Office Communications Server 2007 Forum

70 percent of the questions within the newsgroups are mostly not investigated yet by the discussion member itself. You really can drill down your problem with very good tools released by Microsoft. Most of the time when having such items we need to ask you (did you run the Validation Wizard, did you snooper your log)

Today I would like to give you a overview on which diagnostic tools you can use and where you can download these tools. Within my own mindset it would be;

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit:image

  • Book: here  (this is amazing! 758 pages of OCS stuff) - order in NED
  • Tools: here

Tools (Top 5):

  • (1) Validation Wizard - validate and analyze current configuration and connectivity. Can be launched from the MMC.
  • (2) OCS2007 Logging Tool - start and stops server logs. Can be launched from the MMC.
  • (3) Eventvwr - Windows Operating System. Start > Run > eventvwr
  • (4) Client LogReader - script that client trace logs and highlight errors - Install the OCS Resource Kit
  • (5) Snooper - GUI for summarizing, searching, viewing logs

More in-depth tools are available see: CheckSPN - Archiving CDR Reporter, DBanalyze,LCSDiscover,SIPParser,SrvLookup

So, basically when submitting questions within these newsgroups check these tools and maybe you can get it more to the point for us.  A side of this approach I know there will be some questions you cannot debug/trace please enjoy and give us these questions.

Our goal is to give you a bug free and stable platform!

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