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I've built a nice little widget that lets our Command Center people launch ADPlus.exe to capture crash dumps on failing IIS 6 App Pools. It's doing a bang-up job for us. They capture the forensics without any deep knowledge of WinDBG, and I get to sleep through the night an analyze them in the morning.

The downside is I've had to deploy it to hundreds of servers. I'd rather deploy it to a single central server, and call the process remotely. This means running a command line remotely like:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Debugging Tools for Windows (x86)\adplus.exe" -crash -FullOnFirst -o D:\Captures -p 23740

And before that, I need to identify the PID of the failing worker process as well.

Best suggestion?

codepoke
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1 Answers1

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You might want to read

MSDN Blogs: How To: Collect a Crash dump of an IIS worker process on IIS 7.0 (and above)

It talks about how ADPlus is limited:

because ADPLUS doesn’t have the ability to auto-attach to a new process. You can only attach ADPLUS to a process which is already running on the machine.
This becomes a big limitation for an IIS worker process because a worker process may recycle or shut-down based on what is configured in the application pool settings. Another problem with ADPLUS is that it starts a new window for cdb.exe and someone may accidently close this window which may end up killing the worker process itself.

And so instead you would want to use Debug Diagnostic, or just be content with that fact with Windows dumps crashed processes anyway, and you can pick them up anytime you want:

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i realize it completely bypasses your question; but hopefully in a good way.

Ian Boyd
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  • Thanks for your time, Ian. I'll mark this as an answer, because I'm sure it will be for someone. What I'm doing is pretty specific, and ADPlus really does what I want correctly. I've enjoyed DebugDiag for years, but I don't think I'm ready to generate scripts to drive it the way I'd want to. My suspicion is I'm going to end up advocating PS Remoting as my final solution. Also, IIS 6 doesn't handle crashes as nicely as IIS 7 seems to. I assume those crashes don't include full dumps, or they'd fill up the drive too quickly. – codepoke Mar 17 '11 at 02:46