IDEVDataCollector

Over the last couple of months among other things I’ve been working on a tool to automatically the logs and information in my team we usually ask at the beginning of a new Support Call: all standard things such as IIS logs, event logs, .config files etc… Not all of those files are necessary for every case (as usual it depends on the problem at hand), but experience tells me the more information we have about the environment, the more chances we have to spot small inconsistencies, configuration problems etc… that sometimes can lay unnoticed and interfere with our work.

I tried to keep the UI as simple and organized as possible, utilization is very easy, just run it and click the “Collect” button, sit there a couple of minutes (how much exactly will depend on the logs collected) and you’re done. Please note that I’m still working on it, this is just a preview release but I’d love to have your feedback/bug reports/feature requests etc…, keeping in mind that the scope of this tool is to facilitate troubleshooting and data collection for IIS/ASP.NET related problems, I am not interested (and probably do not have the time) to build an omnicomprehensive tool to replace everything else we have today.

So, here is the list of what it collects so far:

• IIS
  • IIS logs
  • IIS configuration (content of C:\Windows\System32\Inetsrv\config for IIS 7, metabase.xml for IIS 6)
  • HttpErr logs
  • Freb logs (IIS 7 only)
• ASP.NET
  • .config files and .browser files under .NET Framework installation folder(s): all versions available on the machine
  • .config files for the sites/vdirs configured in IIS (the list of sites and applications is dynamically read from the config store)
  • ASP.NET setup logs
  • ACLs for the sites and applications defined in IIS (the list of sites and applications is dynamically read from the config store)
  • Result from browsing get_aspx_version.aspx (the page does not exist, this is made on purpose to get the 404 error page from IIS)
• Event Logs
  • Application
  • Security (not enabled by default)
  • System
• Environment
• System information (uses msinfo32.exe, might take a few minutes to complete)
• Output location
• By default the tool creates a new folder named with the current date and time in the same folder where you run the tool from, but you can chose a different location if you like

Update (March 9th, 2010): added support for IIS 6. Current version is 0.5

Update (March 13th, 2010): made some "code cleanup" and optimizations, source code available for download. Current version is 0.5.1

Already on the “to do” list:

• Add possibility to copy IIS logs only for a specific timeframe (currently it copies all the logs in the folder but on a busy production server this could be a huge amount of data, mostly not useful) 
• Support IIS7 shared configuration
• Collect local policy information for the worker process account
• Collect custom event logs (in case one is used to store custom application messages)
• Improve performances and enhance application logging
• Implement a log report (such a summary HTML page or similar) for easy access and review to the collected information
• Automatically compress the collected logs for an easier transfer
• Suggestions?