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Collecting Dumpfiles for RCAs

  • January 28, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 261 views

Dinuk Amarasinghe
Hero (Employee)
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At the moment I manually collect dump files using task manager for RCA tasks, are there any recommended tools for automating this process?

Best answer by Pranavan Paranthaman

Hi Dinuk,

You can use the ProcDump utility, it’s a command line tool that can be downloaded from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procdump

It can be used to automate monitoring an application for CPU spikes, hang and crash due to unhandled exceptions and generate memory dump files based on required criteria.

 

Listed below are 3 common usage example scenarios of the ProcDump utility.

  • Create dump based on CPU (-c flag)

Obtain the process id (PID) of the application from the Task Manager.

 

Task Manager

 

Open Command Prompt as Administrator and run the following command.

C:\Tools\Procdump\procdump64.exe 3356 -ma -c 1 -s 1 C:\temp\

In this example scenario I’m monitoring the outlook application which has process id 3356 for spikes in CPU over 1% for more than 1 seconds. (Just to get a dump file created :grin: )

 

Command Line

when that scenario is attained a dump file will be generated in the provided path (C:\temp\)

Dump File Location
  • To create dump file when an unhandled exception occurred (-e flag)

             C:\Tools\Procdump\procdump64.exe 12345 -ma -e C:\temp\

  • To creates dump file when a process is hung (-h flag)

             C:\Tools\Procdump\procdump64.exe 12345 -ma -h C:\temp\

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2 replies

Pranavan Paranthaman
Hero (Employee)
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Hi Dinuk,

You can use the ProcDump utility, it’s a command line tool that can be downloaded from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procdump

It can be used to automate monitoring an application for CPU spikes, hang and crash due to unhandled exceptions and generate memory dump files based on required criteria.

 

Listed below are 3 common usage example scenarios of the ProcDump utility.

  • Create dump based on CPU (-c flag)

Obtain the process id (PID) of the application from the Task Manager.

 

Task Manager

 

Open Command Prompt as Administrator and run the following command.

C:\Tools\Procdump\procdump64.exe 3356 -ma -c 1 -s 1 C:\temp\

In this example scenario I’m monitoring the outlook application which has process id 3356 for spikes in CPU over 1% for more than 1 seconds. (Just to get a dump file created :grin: )

 

Command Line

when that scenario is attained a dump file will be generated in the provided path (C:\temp\)

Dump File Location
  • To create dump file when an unhandled exception occurred (-e flag)

             C:\Tools\Procdump\procdump64.exe 12345 -ma -e C:\temp\

  • To creates dump file when a process is hung (-h flag)

             C:\Tools\Procdump\procdump64.exe 12345 -ma -h C:\temp\


Phil Seifert
Ultimate Hero (Employee)
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  • Ultimate Hero (Employee)
  • 1364 replies
  • January 28, 2022

We also use a script to initiate the procdump but also capture other information such as event viewer files, iis logs, etc.  This script is run from the c:\temp\ folder (hardcoded) on the server to gather the information.

In addition to collecting the dumps, logs, and event logs, we also capture DB information such as sp_who, sp_who2 and run another script to help identify database blocks.

The 24x7 P1 support team has this script and use it on the hosted environments when needing to collect the data.


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