A friend called me at home recently… he had bad Exchange issues and it all sounded very confusing. I pointed him to our data collection tools, had him run it and send me the .CAB file. After looking it all over I was able to figure out the problem pretty quickly.
It can be challenging at times to hunt down all sorts of information that you might need when troubleshooting a problem. This is if you are working with a Support Engineer or even if you are not.
So - if you have not used MPSReports, you might like it! This tools packages all sorts of different server information up very neatly into a .CAB file. Note that there are different versions of the tool for different situations. For example, if you are running this on an Exchange server, you should use the Exchange version of the tool - and you can get it here:
870640 How to install the Exchange edition of the Microsoft Product Support
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=870640
But - if you are troubleshooting a DC replication problem (which will eventually bubble up as an Exchange problem), you should use the version created for Domain Controllers.
More info on different other flavors of the tool:
818742 Overview of the Microsoft Configuration Capture Utility (MPS_REPORTS)
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=818742
Location of all download links for different versions:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=CEBF3C7C-7CA5-408F-88B7-F9C79B7306C0&displa...
One more thing - you might wonder what is the difference between this tool and the recently released Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool (ExBPA). To put it shortly, MPSReports is really just a data collection tool which simplifies collection of different logs that are scattered around the system, including the application and system logs. ExBPA on the other hand, has rules and intelligence that examines configuration settings on the server that it is being run against. The two tools really complement each other. This is even more the case now than it used to be before, as the newest version of MPSReports for Exchange actually runs the command line EXBPA report too.
- Nino Bilic
