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What ways are available to see if a custom COM+ application is no longer in use?

I'm with a company that has been doing custom software development for nearly 20 years. They have a lot of older, undocumented COM objects and ASP applications that are now being rewritten using modern tools. There are about 3 dozen custom COM+ applications on a production Windows 2003 server and it is not clear whether these are used any longer.

It is not possible to use the "disable it and see what breaks" approach.

This is relevant only because of an upcoming server migration project. I don't want to have to move this old stuff if I don't have to.

Any suggestions?

Greg
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  • Can you not move it and see what breaks in the upcoming migration project? – HopelessN00b Mar 07 '14 at 18:49
  • No, I cannot move or otherwise disable a production component. While old, the applications (as a whole) serve some pretty mission critical stuff. A crash would result in bad thing. – Greg Mar 07 '14 at 18:51
  • You might have to move all the old crap, then. There's no used/unused attribute to query (unless someone coded one in - not bloody likely), and I know that trying to monitor them for usage is going to be an unholy nightmare, which will only tell you if they happen to be used during your monitoring period, and not whether or not they might be needed if some rare event triggers or whatever. Safe thing to do would be to just migrate the old crap and beat your developers with reams of paper for not documenting their crap. – HopelessN00b Mar 07 '14 at 18:55
  • Well that isn't an option because the the developers who created that code are no longer with the company and moving this older code it is not supported by management. So the question remains, what technical options are available to see a COM+ application is every activated/used. – Greg Mar 10 '14 at 11:49
  • Well, short of reading the source code, the only effective test is to see what breaks when you blow away custom COM+ object X, and repeat until you've tested all the custom COM+ objects. Since you said that's not an option, you should move all the crap over. – HopelessN00b Mar 10 '14 at 12:49

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The solution I am working with is a small custom application that runs every 2 minutes and logs what COM+ services are running. After a month or two, this should give me the picture I'm looking for.

Examples on the code came from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3726609/check-if-com-application-is-already-running

There are other viable options, including using Sysinternals Process Monitor to look for when the COM registry keys are accessed. This is probably the most accurate method, however, it puts a load on the server I would not be comfortable running for a month in production.

Community
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Greg
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