Use OMS (Log Analytic) to monitor and send alert for BlueScreen of Death

At times there is a driver or two that’s misbehaving and causing bluescreens. As the server automatically reboots after dumping memory to the memory.dmp file you might not get a report from your users that there has been a problem. And depending on your monitoring tool you might not get an alter there either. Operations Manager can easily alert you for things like that, but far from all customers use OpsMgr due to it’s complexity. Luckily, it’s just a 1 minute job to get alert in OMS if you have got a bluescreen! And as OMS can be run in Free mode, you may be able to monitor your servers for free (all depending on the amount of data you collect) and else, it’s really cheap so no big deal if you need to use a standard subscription. Anyway, lets get to the technical stuff!

First of all, enable OMS to collect Eventlog System and all Error messages.

omserrordata

Then create an Alert like this,

oms_bsod

The Alert text to be used is:

That will only alert for Crashes. You can also enable an alert for Event ID 6008 which will alert you for an unexpected shutdown. The difference is that my alert will only send an alert if there was a BSOD while an unexpected alert could also alert if someone pulled the power. Or even combine both into one alert with an OR statement. In my case, I just want to get alerted about the BSOD’s so thats the only thing I look for right now.

Tell how often is should check. There is usually no need to check more than once or twice an hour. And finally define if it should send an email alert or use one of the other alert methods.

Easy as that! Next time you get a bluescreen on a server, you will get an alert by mail so you can debug the dump and find out what’s causing it.

It will look like this,

bsodmail

 

Disable ASUS Mini Bar (AsPowerBar.exe)

asusminibarNot 100% work related but computer related. I reinstalled my home PC last week and also installed the ASUS AI Suite 3 tools to make it easier with overclocking and handling the fans and pump for my custom liquid cooling system.

One annoying thing is the ASUS Mini Bar (also called ASPowerBar.exe if you check in Task Manager) that automatically starts. When you logon to Windows. Easy to remove I thought and just downloaded one of the best (and free!) tools ever, called Sysinternals Autoruns which makes it super easy to see and disable all programs that automatically starts for various reasons including the ones launched form Task Manager or as Shell Extensions.

But there was no reference at all to be found related to the Asus Mini Bar. Ehh?  Well turned out that it was a lot easier than that.

asus

Just right click on the Asus AI Suite icon in the systray and remove the checkbox for ASUS Mini Bar! It’s the AI Suite tool that launches the Mini Bar…

I hope it can help someone else who’s like me digging through the Registry and Autorun folders and what ever else.

 

MSI Error 25543 when installing SPF Update Rollup

When trying to install an Update Rollup for SPF through Windows Update you may run into a Failed installation. And running the update manually gives a MSI Error 25543 where you have to click the Ok button like 10 times before it abort.

I’ve solved that at three different occasions by just stopping the IIS “Internet Information Services” and then installing the update manually.

Remember to start IIS after the update is installed and verify the bindings for SPF is still correct (there has been occasions where there have been duplicate bindings).

 

Potential version mismatch between WAP and SPF, please verify both component’s versions and if they’re compatible

I had a customer today who were getting errors when trying to create Virtual Machines in Windows Azure Pack (WAP).

WAP Tenant Log file
WAP Tenant Log file

Looking in the logfile on the Tenant server (Tenant Admin Log) showed that there were quite a lot of Error Events when a user is trying to create a server.

Some operations worked, like creating a virtual network but not deploying a virtual machine.

The interesting part here is the reference to; “Potential version mismatch between WAP and SPF, please verify both component’s versions and if they’re compatible”

Full Eventlog details, might help with search indexes.

 

I had a look at the SPF Server, and immediately noticed that the version of SPF was System Center 2016 RTM with no updates installed.

Updating SPF to the same version as Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2016 and Windows Azure Pack solved the problem.