1

We've been struggling to identify a issue where all our bespoke systems crash at least once a day. We haven't changed all our systems to we're trying to pin down what else has changed which is resulting in all of these crashes.

We're also doing various tests and controlled changes to try and narrow down the issue.

However I wondered if there was a Windows server monitoring tool that might give us deep insight into what's happening to the OS, hardware, etc.? We need something better than the standard event logs which aren't proving to be very useful at the moment.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Ben Pilbrow
  • 11,995
  • 5
  • 35
  • 57
Mayuresh Walke
  • 55
  • 3
  • 1
    The whole system crashes? Have you tried setting up a memory dump? http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2008/01/08/understanding-crash-dump-files.aspx – Nixphoe Aug 24 '11 at 14:59
  • Sorry, I should have been more specific. Just our bespoke applications crash. These applications are quite old and not ones we can edit or change easily, so we're a bit limited in what we can do to them to try and get around this issue. – Mayuresh Walke Aug 24 '11 at 21:46
  • There's way to force getting dump files from specific applications. But the best place to get the information how to troubleshoot if a specific application is crashing is to contact the vendor. If they don't support it any more, you're kind of out of luck with that. – Nixphoe Aug 24 '11 at 22:02

1 Answers1

1

If I were in your shoes, I'd start with Process Monitor. It will track all file, network, and Registry access by a given application (such as open a given file, read from the file, open a Registry key, write data into that key, etc. etc.). You can then review the logs thus generated to see what the immediate cause of the crash is and work backwards from there.

Handyman5
  • 5,177
  • 25
  • 30