All The Logging In The World

There’s normal troubleshooting and then there’s the stuff you do when the basic troubleshooting doesn’t get things resolved.  Normal troubleshooting can be things like selecting “last known good” on a reboot after installing a new driver and having a blue screen.  Or perhaps uninstalling and then reinstalling an application, or altering settings for the application or operating system to alleviate a problem.

Sometimes we have to dig in and find out more.

Many admins out there in the world live that every day.  Which is why we add methods to find out more into our products.  This post is all about listing all of the data gathering methods that a Directory Services person may ever need to know.  Since there are so many it will be difficult to organize well in one uber post but I’m going to put it out there for you all anyway, disorganized or not.

A while back I created a spreadsheet which could be used to select the Directory Services technology which is being looked at as having a problem and then use the spreadsheet to narrow down what data should be looked at.

I broke this down into columns for Technology, Logging Name, General Problem Description, Short Description of Benefits, "Should be Done" (meaning how frequently that technique is done generally to fix an issue) and the URL or steps on how to set up that logging.

The original document was an Excel spreadsheet, but I saved it as a monolithic file web file.  If you have Excel you can use the Microsoft Office Web Components (install them from the link for free if you don't have them) and use the pull down menus to help easily narrow down how what data to gather.

A few caveats about this list.  First, it doesn't tell you how to read the results, only what data to gather and how to gather it.  Second, it doesn't focus on a specific operating system version.  I have given a few posts on some of the logging (like USERENV) so you can refer to those if it helps.  Third, this is not an entirely comprehensive list but it gets nearly all.  There's always going to be something new or rarely used, you know?

The file is available as a download from this blog post.  Also, please forgive the formatting which I suspect may truncate some of the columns.  It depends in part on your browser and the blog style sheet, but it may encourage you to download and use the Excel sheet for this instead.

I'm also pasting the information below.  Again, for formatting purposes I hope you have multimon set up so that you can stretch the page since otherwise it may be difficult to read.  But I wanted to be sure and post it in the page since I don't want to unintentionally penalize a reader who doesn't use Microsoft Office.  Though you should readers, it's a great product.

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I hope this helps everyone out.  If you come across a logging, or have a question on this just post a comment.  Let me add one more thing too:  thanks for using Microsoft products for your needs.  We appreciate it, and want to help if they're not working as you want them to.  Enough said.

DirectoryServicesLogging.mht