Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant (ExTRA) : Outlook Meeting Vanishing

Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant (ExTRA) :  How To Take Traces Using ExTRA and Analyse

In this post I will be explaining how to take Exchange traces using ExTRA tool and will show how the traces will look like.

This tool is basically used for various Exchange troubleshooting, but in this post we will be seeing hot to Enable Exchange tracing for calendar issues.

Note: It is always recommended to take the help of  Microsoft Support Engineer on Call before proceeding these steps.

The issue what we are going to check is for an user whose calendar items are getting missed frequently. So, to check how the calendar invites are missing/deleted we are going to follow these steps.

      How to enable trace in Exchange Servers.

1.     Exchange 2007/2010 comes in built with ExTRA which helps you trace activities that occur in the store or database
2.     Open cmd prompt as admin and type ExTra to open it “or”
3.     Start –> Run –> ExTra
4.     This will open the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant
5.     Now Select a new task and click next and select “Trace control”. This will throw an error “This server does not have the module needed for interpreting traces. Continue only if this is being done under the direct supervision of a qualified Exchange support engineer.”
6.     On the “Configure Trace File” page, configure the location of the trace
7.     DO NOT enable “circular logging” and select “Create a new file when max trace file size is reached”
8.     Under “select the type of tracing needed” select the option “Set Trace Tags Manually”
9.     Select Trace Types – PFD, Fatal, Error, Warning, Info, Debug, Performance, Function
10.  Under ‘Components to Trace’ – Select “Store”
11.  Select ‘Trace Tags’ –
tagCalendarChange
tagCalendarDelete – This tag is going to capture all calendar deletions
tagMtgMessageChange
tagMtgMessageDelete
12.  If you want to enable tracing for just one sure, do so using “Show mailbox trace filtering options” and select the user
13.  Now click “Start Tracing”
14.  The next time the user reports the issue, you will have the “*.etl” file with details on who/what deleted it

15.  Stop and Exit the trace when you feel comfortable the collected logs are enough to troubleshoot.
16.  Let Microsoft PSS can analyze the output file and see what deleted the calendar item


This is what I saw on analysing the output file:

This means that the one of the re-occurring calendar item with the subject “July-Dec 2015-APJ Local Deal Governance” was deleted at “12/Aug/2015 12:28:45 AM” by the user "System Administrator “on outlook client”



How to convert the ETL logs to CSV report.

Traces will be viewable by an Exchange Support Engineer, he will use a tool to view the ETL logs.

extrace.exe –c –v ExchangeDebugTrace.ETL > output.csv

Notes:

• Trace logs might get filled up quickly, so when you enable the tracking make sure there is          enough free disk space on the server.
•  Stop the trace when you don’t want it any more. Make sure you exit the console.
•  Use ExTRA tool for the respective mailbox versions. E.g... Exchange 2007 / 2010.
•  To enable the trace you need to always login to the mailbox server on which the user                  mailbox is present.

 If you need any help to analyse the ETL logs, please forward we could try to help you.


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Generating Exchange Environment Report

Generating Exchange Environment Report

This script automatically generate a report that give an overview of our existing environment with following contents.

Total Servers per Exchange version & service pack
Total Mailboxes per Exchange version & service pack, plus Office 365 remote mailboxes
Totals for Exchange roles across the environment

• A site-by-site breakdown for the following:

1. Mailboxes per site
2. HTTPS FQDNs used for Internal, External and SCP URLs
3. CAS array names
4. Exchange servers, version, update rollup and version, service level, highlighted installed roles, OS version and service pack

• A breakdown of each Database Availability Group including:

1. DAG name, member count and member list
2. Database information such as
3. Name
4. Mailboxes per database and Average Size
5. Archive mailboxes (If Available) per database and Average Size – only shown if a DB includes Archive mailboxes
6. Database and whitespace size
7. Database and log disk free space percentage
8. Last full backup date/time (new) – only shown if at least one DAG DB has had a full backup
9. Circular Logging state (new) – only shown if at least one DAG DB has circular logging enabled (If Available)
10. Server hosting the active copy
11. List of servers hosting copies and copy count.

A breakdown of Non-DAG databases including Exchange 2007 DBs, including the database information above, along with Storage Group name.

This dashboard is limited to Exchange 2003/2007 and Public folders. Where it does not give detailed information’s for Exchange 2007 clusters. But, shows the output as ClusMBX in the output.

Script to Generate the Exchange Environment Report

Download the Script from the following link.

Save this script in Text format and convert into ps1. or Directly save in PS1 format.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9raLabzxFwxRlhKVjFkY2JsRzA

Executing the script is straightforward – the only setting you need is to specify where to write the HTML file:

.\Get-ExchangeEnvironmentReport -HTMLReport c:\report.html

If you want it to email the results, the follow parameters are available to allow the report to be sent directly from the script:

.\Get-ExchangeEnvironmentReport -HTMLReport c:\report.html -SendMail:$true -MailFrom:you@example.com -MailTo:you@example.com -MailServer:smtp.example.com

Finally, to schedule the report to be generated nightly, execute with your preferred options and add the -ScheduleAs parameter, for example:

.\Get-ExchangeEnvironmentReport -HTMLReport c:\report.html -SendMail:$true -MailFrom:you@example.com -MailTo:you@example.com -MailServer:smtp.example.com -ScheduleAs:DOMAIN\user

Output View of this Report.

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Please update your comments or feedback.

Contact me @: exctech2013@gmail.com