DebugDiag for Windows x64

Jul 24

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DebugDiag is Microsoft diagnostic tool for troubleshooting process crashes, hangs and high memory usage.

See introduction article, written by Michael Morales (a senior escalation engineer for Microsoft’s Global Escalation Services team) in December 2008 issue of Windows IT Pro magazine, InstantDocID# 100577, for details on how to use this tool.

At the moment I’m investigating “weird” Oracle service crash on Windows 2003 x64 (hopefully non-production server) that occurs more or less at the same time every day. What makes troubleshooting this case interesting is a complete lack of any trace files by Oracle. Nothing in alert.log, bdum, udump etc.
I knew that using some OS debug tool is my only hope to narrow down the cause for the service crash.

As a longtime subscriber on Windows IT Pro Magazine, I was well aware of the great articles written by Mr. Morales, so it was not hard to find one with DebugDiag description.

The only version that I found on Microsoft site was Debug Diagnostic Tool v1.1, which unfortunately supports only Windows x86. Somehow discouraged I sent an email to Mr. Morales asking if there is any plans to port this tool to Windows x64. He made my day by promptly replying the link to IIS Diagnostic Toolkit 1.0, part of which is also DebugDiag. At the time of writing this note this is the latest release for Windows x64 and documentation can be found here.

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Posted on 24.07.2009, in MS Windows and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.

  1. alesk | 06.08.2009 at 15:46

    a feedback from the trench….
    I owe a fair warning about DebugDiag after spending significant amount of time trying to “catch” debug trace of the Oracle instance crash. It simply didn’t work for me, so I gave up. Whatever I did I never got any kind of the trace. I’ll leave this note here, perhaps someone will have more luck with it.
    If time permits I’ll try to use another tool from Microsoft, ADPlus. In contrast to DebugDiag, ADPlus dumps seems to be targeted solely to Microsoft Product Support Services, at least I could not find analyzer that could “translate” dumps to some human readable output.