If you are following this blog since 2008 when I started you probably noticed that troubleshooting is a subject that I love it. Troubleshooting using tools like Perfmon and Windbg is amazing. In my new role at Microsoft I don’t deal with this on the daily basis anymore (like I used to on CSS Forefront...

Introduction Consider a scenario where a client migrated from on-premise Exchange to Exchange Online and after this migration the users are experiencing issues while sending e-mail. During high peak times Outlook clients can’t send e-mails. Messages are getting stuck in the Outbox . When this issue was...

1. Introduction I had this article almost ready way back when I was on Forefront TMG Team but never had time to finish. This is about an issue where wspsrv.exe process was consuming high CPU in random moments of the day and the only workaround to make this process to use less CPU was to restart Firewall...

Last week I presented a session on MVP Summit in Redmond about Troubleshooting TMG Performance issues . During that presentation I said to the MVPs there that I will be writing a cheat sheet with some WinDBG commands that can be used while troubleshooting TMG performance issues. I thought about this...

Back in 2009 I wrote this post about PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs Tool), during that time we didn’t have ISA/TMG template available. Good news is that we now have the TMG template available!!! Back in April 2010 we had our Security Summit in Porto (Portugal) where we started to elaborate a plan...

Yesterday I published this post about an issue that caused TMG stop to respond and I want to clarify one key point here: TMG didn’t stop because was not able to handle the load , let’s be clear on that. Maybe it was not clear for some readers that don’t know about how TMG works, but the issue here was...

1. Introduction   Yes, another case where TMG stops responding…bad, bad TMG right? NOT!!! Recently I worked in some scenarios where TMG was stopping every day, during the same time and required a manual restart. TMG Admin claimed that nothing really changed on TMG or on the client workstations,...

1. Introduction   Yesterday I wrote about the “perfect storm” case where the root cause was disk bottleneck, today I would like to discuss a troubleshooting scenario for one of the 5 core scenarios that was presented yesterday , which is called “authentication”. Again, the symptom was exactly the...

1. Introduction   As more I deal with Performance issue on ISA Server (or TMG), more I realize that there are not really a lot of new things on this area to be explored. The reason why I say that there are not much of new things on this area is because I can easily map the top five core causes of...

1. Introduction   Troubleshooting high CPU utilization can be challenging, even when you know the process that is causing such behavior, which in this case is the wspsrv.exe.   In order to better understand what’s going on in scenarios like this is recommended to get perfmon snapshot, including...

Slow browsing experience is a behavior that can happen for so many reasons that cover everything in one single article is just not feasible, mainly when the list still growing. Here are some posts/articles that I wrote on this matter: How Disk Bottleneck can affect TMG Performance? Side Effects of Incorrect...

I would like to say thanks for all partners that joined this morning to the troubleshooting performance issue on ISA Server session, it was great to share some ISA Perf best practices with you all. We had a great audience from many locations (US, Europe, Brazil and other places), which makes me really...

1. Introduction This post is about a scenario where Firewall Administrator notices that the application log in the ISA Server computer is full of events 14197 saying: Event ID 14197 Source Microsoft Web Proxy Type Error Description ISA Server failed to write content to cache file...

Next February 9th 11:30 AM CST I will be delivering a presentation about Troubleshooting ISA Server 2006 Performance issues for Microsoft Partners, if you are a partner and deal with ISA Server you should watch this presentation. Here it is the agenda with the core topics that will be covered: What about...

I was reading the Windows IT Pro Magazine of this month (September 2009) and there I found a nice article written by an Escalation Engineer here from Microsoft Texas ( Michael Morales ) where he describes how to use ProcDump to catch high CPU utilization. This is an amazing tool that can also help ISA...

Sounds familiar? Interesting though is that in this case it was not an ISA issue (really??? J ) and was actually fixed using the solution below from IE Team: http://blogs.msdn.com/askie/archive/2009/07/17/slow-performance-in-internet-explorer-8-after-installing-the-skype-v4-1-application.aspx ...

1. Introduction One of the most painful issues to resolve on ISA Server is when the Firewall Service stops and doesn’t come up again. Many times this happens without a previous warning and most of the times is because ISA is failing to load something or to commit some kind of configuration that...

Couple of days ago I was assisting a friend to troubleshoot the infamous 5783 that was causing the authentication prompt issue that we all know about. In this case the problem was happening throughout the night, which was even odder because during the day when the traffic was really high the issue wasn...

1. Introduction Last post I was mentioning how important it is to have a good planning phase for a technology that you are going to implement it. Planning doesn’t mean only sizing the right hardware for your needs, but also how you will configure the Server to be capable to handle the traffic that...

There is nothing better to avoid headaches then a good planning for the technology that you are about to implement. Many scenarios of poor performance or inappropriate behavior sometimes happen because administrators skip the planning phase and go direct to the implementing phase. My advice here is:...

Tired of reading huge BLG files and compare with triggers to see if the system is running as it should? I hear you my friend! It is time to automate that using PAL – Performance Analysis of Logs , a great tool created by a MSFTE that you can download from http://pal.codeplex.com and get the tips from...

Just a quick follow up on the article that I wrote for the ISA Team Blog about ISA stopping answering requests . Last week I was collaborating with Networking Team in another case where ISA was stopping answering because of delays in DNS response. They fixed the DNS issue by changing the registry keys...

1. Introduction This is another one of those cases where ISA Server Service mysterious crashes once a day, at the same time and nothing changed in the environment. This just make me really fell that the lack of communication between the teams that deals with technology is getting far beyond of...

This post could easily be called “Slow Internet through ISA Server”, but I decided to change the title and the focus. I’m doing that for a simple reason: people still thinking that only Windows system needs to be patched. What an untrue statement this is and how I’m convinced more and more that if you...

Last week we (ISA Server Team in Texas) faced an interesting issue where remote Outlook Clients using RPC over HTTPs were not able to communicate with the internal Exchange Server. Pretty challenge case since on the ISA Server side there was nothing really obvious missing, netmon also didn’t help that...