Problem

On Exchange 2010, you may notice the below event firing rapidly. In our scenerio we were seeing the service attempt to start and go down approximatly 420 times an hour, logging the below 4999 every time. The only action that was taken prior to this problem appearing was the instalation of Exchange 2010 Sp2. It has been noted that this same problem has occured while installing various RollUps (RUs) as well.

 Log Name:      Application
Source:        MSExchange Common
Event ID:      4999
Task Category: General
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Description:
Watson report about to be sent for process id: #, with parameters: E12, c-RTL-AMD64, 14.02.0247.005, MSExchangeTransportLogSearch, MSExchangeTransportLogSearch, M.E.T.L.S.MailFlowStatistics.InitializeRecord, System.OutOfMemoryException, a3ee, 14.02.0247.003.
ErrorReportingEnabled: False

Resolution

When we have seen the problem in the past, the problem has happened when a function attempted to format information from these files. The end result is a IndexOutofRangeException when trying to read the contents of temporary stored statistics.

1. Rename the following directory (to preserve existing data for root cause if desired):
   
        Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\TransportRoles\Logs\ActiveUsersStats\Backup
   
   
2. Restart the Microsoft Exchange Transport Log Search service

Upon restarting the service a new Backup directory is created by the service and the error will not persist.

The problem:

 We have very valuable data inside of the IIS logs that can greatly assist in troubleshooting Exchange Web Service clients.  The problem is that all of the data exists in one field (cs-uri-query) inside of the IIS logs.

An example cs-uri-query field for a EWS call:

;RC:111111ac-1111-1111-1111-111112c1111;Init>>Conn:0,HangingConn:0,AD:30000/30000/0%,CAS:54000/54000/0%,AB:30000/30000/0%,RPC:36000/36000/0%,FC:1000/0,Policy:DefaultThrottlingPolicy_3333333-3333-3333-3333-333333333333,Norm,Sub:5000/0;SoapAction=GetUserAvailability;AddressCount=1;MessageId=urn:uuid:db01111-da7c-4f46-b89d-1111be7aaaaa;Requester=S-3-3-33-3333223333-3333333333-3333673333-3323333;local=1;Threads.Worker.Available=1198;Threads.Worker.InUse=0;Threads.IO.Available=1194;Threads.IO.InUse=1;Failures=0;MailboxRPC.TimeTaken=0;MailboxRPC.RequestCount=0;AD.TimeTaken=0;AD.RequestCount=2;Request.CPU.Main=0;Local.FirstThreadExecute=0;Local.LongPole.Elapsed.TimeTaken=53;Local.LongPole.Elapsed.Destination=server.company.com;LocalLongPole.TimeTaken=3;LocalLongPole.RequestCount=28;LocalLongPole.Destination=server2.company.com;TotalLocal.TimeTaken=53;TotalLocal.RequestCount=1;Thread.CPU.LongPole.TimeTaken=15;Thread.CPU.LongPole.Destination=LocalRequest.Execute;Request.Phase.PreQuery=5;Request.Phase.RequestDispatcher.BeginInvoke=0;Request.Phase.RequestDispatcher.Complete=54;Request.Phase.PostQuery=0;Request.CPU.Total=15;TimeInAS=59;[C]Queues:0msec/Execute:59msec;End(61ms)>>Conn:1,HangingConn:0,AD:30000/29996/1%,CAS:54000/53940/1%,AB:30000/30000/0%,RPC:36000/35972/1%,FC:1000/0,Policy:DefaultThrottlingPolicy_333333-3333-3333-3333-aaaaaaaaaaaa,Norm[Resources:(DC)dc.company.comHealth:-1%,HistLoad:0),(DC)dc2.company.com(Health:-1%,HistLoad:0),(Mdb)DatabaseName(Health:-1%,HistLoad:0),],Sub:5000/0;

The solution:

We will utilize logparser purely for speed

Download Log Parser

The LogParser Query:

It took a bit of time to work around some of the logic, but this works well.

Logparser.exe -i:iisw3c "SELECT time, date, cs-username, substr(substr(cs-uri-query, index_of(cs-uri-query, 'Impersonate')),0,index_of(substr(cs-uri-query, index_of(cs-uri-query, 'Impersonate')),';')) AS [Impersonate], substr(substr(cs-uri-query, index_of(cs-uri-query, 'SoapAction')),0,index_of(substr(cs-uri-query, index_of(cs-uri-query, 'SoapAction')),';')) AS [SoapAction], substr(substr(cs-uri-query,index_of(cs-uri-query, 'RC')),0,index_of(substr(cs-uri-query, index_of(cs-uri-query, 'RC')),';')) AS [RC Data], cs-uri-stem, substr(substr(cs-uri-query, index_of(cs-uri-query, 'Execute')),0,index_of(substr(cs-uri-query, index_of(cs-uri-query, 'Execute')),';')) AS [Time to Execute] INTO c:\logs\out.csv FROM c:\logs\*.log Where cs-username = 'Domain\ServAcct' AND cs-uri-query LIKE '%SoapAction%'"

Note: output goes into the file specified after the INTO clause above. Input is taken from the FROM clause. Notice we are grabbing all .log files in a directory. We are also filtering for requests coming from one user, typipcally applications will authenticate as one user and Impersonate the intended target.

What this query does:

-Only fields that are sent by a specific user (Domain\ServAcct above)

Splits the csi-uri-query to pull out:

• who the above user is impersonating as
• what the soapaction is
• the RC field
• The Execution time

 It took me a bit to understand the built in functions to sort the data we needed.

The output:

How fast is this?

On my (rather speedy) laptop with about 650 megs of logs:

Statistics:

-----------

Elements
processed: 827827

Elements
output:    325218

Execution
time:     11.02 seconds

Great, i see the data in Excel.... How can i make it useful?

Sorting and Charting in Excel is extremely helpful, I'll go through a few scernios that shed some light on our issue

Counts for each user:

Counts for each Action:

That looks great, how do I get that level of detail out of the logs?

Note: I am using Excel 2010

To Calculate Counts for each user:

•  Open the .csv output in Excel
• Without selecting any cells, click insert, PivotTable
• At Select a Table or Range, the default should be all Cells, click New Worksheet
• On the new worksheet with the PivotTable click Impersonate and SoapAction under PivotTable Field List (upper right)

• Now drag SoapAction to the (Sum) Values box at the bottom right

• Now we will want to fix the sort to list the user with the highest number of requests first
• Highlight all of the values inside of “Count of SoapAction” column (not gathering the header or the total at the bottom)
• Click the Data tab

• Select Z to A to sort Largest to Smallest (Next to Sort, upper right)

To Calculate Counts for each Action:

• Open the .csv output in Excel
• Without selecting any cells, click insert, PivotTable
• At Select a Table or Range, the default should be all Cells, click New Worksheet
• On the new worksheet with the PivotTable click SoapAction under PivotTable Field List (upper right)

• Now drag SoapAction to the (Sum) Values box at the bottom right

Now look at the worksheet with the Pivot Table, you should see the data sorted correctly. Using the same technique you can sort or chart the data by time to get an idea of when the bulk of requests are coming in

-CaseyS