“Rough and Tough” guide to identifying patterns in Transaction Logs

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Often times, either due to a misconfiguration/bug/solar eclipse or otherwise, customers call into Microsoft Product Support Services complaining that their Exchange server is churning out transaction logfiles at an alarming rate. For every instance of this symptom, there are at least a dozen reasons why this is happening. Regardless, there's never been a good way to parse the transaction logs and extract any useful patterns. In lieu of rolling up my sleeves and actually writing code to accomplish such a task, I've slapped together a bunch of utilities that will do the job. Ugly? Sure. Useful? You bet. Having used it against many customer issues, I can attest that this actually works, and works quite well.

 

1. Download the "Unix for Win32" utilities from https://downloads.sourceforge.net/unxutils/UnxUtils.zip?modtime=1172730504&big_mirror=0

2. Extract all files from the UnxUtils\usr\local\wbin subsirectory to C:\UNIX

3. Download strings.exe from https://live.sysinternals.com/strings.exe, and place strings.exe into C:\UNIX

4. Make a C:\TMP directory (Unix tools need a Win32 equivalent of /tmp)

5. Make a directory for all your transaction log files (i.e. D:\customers\test), and place all the logs in this dir

6. From a cmd prompt, navigate to your C:\UNIX dir

7. Run the following command:

 

strings -q -n 16 D:\customers\test\*.log | cut -f3 -d: | sort | uniq -c | sort | tee c:\log-output.wri

 

What this is doing:

 

· Identifies all strings in the logs greater than 16 chars

· Removes the D:\customers\test\E00xxxx.log: from the output

· Sorts the output

· Finds all duplicate records, and retains a count

· Sorts the final output (ending with the largest # of occurrences)

· Writes all the output to c:\log-output.wri (use WordPad / write.exe to open; notepad.exe mangles the output)

 

 

If you're running this on Windows 7 or above, you'll have to modify the output directory as follows (as it won't let you write directly to the root of the C: drive) ...

 

strings -q -n 16 D:\customers\test\*.log | cut -f3 -d: | sort | uniq -c | sort | tee c:\users\yourname\log-output.wri

 

 

The output will be sorted from the least number of repeating occurences to greatest, so crack open that log-output.wri file, scroll to the bottom, and commence spelunking!