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Trace32 Commonly Missed Features

Posted August 24th, 2011 by Matt Shadbolt

I haven’t posted for a while as I’ve been busy with my new
job

I’m now a Premier Field Engineer working for Microsoft on
our SCCM team. For more info on the PFE team visit www.microsoft.com/services.

So I thought I’d post one some info on one of the most used
SCCM tools – Trace32. I know just about every SCCM admin uses Trace32 to read
the copious amounts of SMS logs, but there are a couple of features that,
surprisingly, very few of my customers even know about!

Here we go:

Trace32’s Error Lookup feature

One of the more important but commonly missed features is
the Error Lookup option in Trace32’s Tools > Error Lookup (Ctrl + L) menu.

The Error Lookup tool will return descriptions of cryptic
error codes from:

Windows error codes

WMI error codes

Winhttp error codes

Trace32’s Merge selected files feature

When trying to troubleshoot specific issues such as site
replication issues, it’s sometimes necessary to open more than one log file at
once. Windows 7’s window snap feature makes viewing two logs side-by-side
really easy, but sometimes a more accurate timeline is needed between viewing
log files.

If you select Open in Trace32, Ctrl-click on multiple log
files in the open dialog box, tick Merge
selected files you will find that all the selected log files will merge
together into one large super log. The log entries are automatically sorted by
time so it’s super easy to see ConfigMgr process certain things and log the
progress across multiple logs.

In this quick example I’m just viewing the process for
finding a clients default management point.

As you can see, the client is logging to both LocationServices.log
and ClientLocation.log and it’s quite easy to read the timeline of what is
going on.

Trace32’s Last Directory registry key

Lastly, a minor but handy tip, Trace32 by default will save
the last log location that you opened. This is really handy as you don’t have
to browse to the logs path every time you want to read SMS logs. It is a bit of
a pain though when you use Trace32 on a client, because every time you launch
Trace32 for the first time on a certain machine, it defaults to the
%userprofile%\Desktop directory.  The Last Directory registry found at
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Trace32 is the key that controls the default open
location. If you add a GPO that updates your clients to %windir%\System32\CCM\Logs\
every time you jump on a machine it will automatically open Trace32 at the
client log location.

You can download the Trace32/64 tools as part of the ConfigMgr 2007 toolkit from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=9257

.

Posted by Matt Shadbolt
http://mattlog.net
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Tags: ConfigMgr, SCCM, sms, Trace32

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