Unified Communications Diagnostics 8.5 - Release Notes

In the Management Console, support is added for creating a server health test to monitor Application and Services event logs in the Exchange crimson channels such as HighAvailability or MailboxDatabaseFailureItems. This feature mainly affects Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2016 mailbox servers. However, you can also manually add Application and Services event log entries for earlier versions of Exchange, for Skype for Business and Lync, and for Blackberry metrics.

358417

Health test notifications now support the following options:

698380

Support is added for SQL Server Always On. If you have an existing UC Diagnostics deployment, see “Configuring existing UC Diagnostics to work with SQL Always On” in the UC Diagnostics Deployment Guide for information about how to configure UC Diagnostics for Always On.

697712

For the Management Console, the 32-bit application memory limitation of 2 GB has been updated for 64-bit operating systems. User memory mode is increased from 2 GB to 4 GB for the SpotlightDiagnosticTestEngine.exe and the SpotlightDistributedCollector.exe services.

640356

The Collector Recovery executable file would crash occasionally. There was a “Spotlight has Stopped working” error (Application Name: CollectorRecovery.exe) that is popped up.

346032

In the Diagnostics Console, when a user configured the alarm log to send an alarm notification through SMTP, UC Diagnostics would display an “out of system resources” error message.

692287

The View License Details dialog in the Management Console now displays the correct number of users or number of mailboxes.

727949

Argument exception handling is improved to resolve the endless loop issue of event log handling for the server health test. Previously, the server health test would time out when there were a large number of event log entries.

682982

Do not install UC Diagnostics on the same machine as Spotlight on Active Directory or as MessageStats.

NA

When running the Exchange External Message Delivery Health Test against Exchange 2013 in which the CAS server is behind a load balancer, the test did not complete and it failed with the error “Failed to open the default message store”.

Workaround

Remove the Exchange External Message Delivery Health Test and run the Exchange Modern Message Delivery Health Test instead.

452686

If you are upgrading from 8.2, some health tests will not run immediately for Exchange 2016. You must edit each test once and click Finish to cause the previous test to run and retrieve some of the counter values correctly. The tests that must be edited after upgrade are as follows:

593819

For a Skype for Business/Lync environment, if a DNS Alias record is configured for a front-end pool or standard edition server rather than a Host A record, UC Diagnostics will fail to discover and run the synthetic transaction health tests with that pool or server. This issue is only found on 32-bit and 64-bit systems of Windows 2008. Newer operating systems do not have this issue.

325647

In Skype for Business or Lync Discovery, the display name of PstnGateway only shows the numbers/characters before the first dot. There is a problem when PstnGateway name is an IP address.

354306

Upgrading from version 8.2 or later

As of UC Diagnostics 8.3, Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 are not supported. If you are upgrading from UC Diagnostics 8.2, use the Force Discovery Now option to repopulate your topology view. If you are upgrading from 8.3, use this option to ensure Exchange version service pack and CU (cumulative update) information is shown for Exchange servers.

Solution

599577

662418

If the BlackBerry Server Health Test runs on a standby BlackBerry server in a high availability configuration, the test results show errors for BlackBerry services that are not running. However, these services are not required to run in the standby server and no error exists.

Workaround: Perform the BlackBerry server health test on the primary BlackBerry server only, or run a separate BlackBerry server health test on the standby BlackBerry server with the affected service counters set to 'informational'.

161453

If you are installing Exchange 2013 and have upgraded to the newest version of MAPI & CDO (version 6.5.8320.0) to support RPC over HTTP) in a mixed environment, some health tests may not run properly. ESM and MAPI & CDO might not work together.

Workaround: Uninstall ESM. Reinstall the new MAPI & CDO for Exchange:
(http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39045).

274631

UC Diagnostics 8.4.1 was rebranded to the Quest company name and the installation path is now Quest. After you upgrade from 8.2, 8.3 or 8.4 to the current version, the Save As Template and Save As (Drilldown/AlarmLog) dialogs might still point to the previous installation path since Windows saved the path in the registry.

Workaround

You must manually redirect and save to the new default Quest path such as "%current_user%\AppData\Roaming\Quest\Shared\Templates".

687018

On a Windows Server 2016, when you launch the Diagnostics Console for the first time, you can see the following error: “There is no default printer currently selected.”

Workaround

Open the Devices and Printer page by selecting either:

All subsequent launches of the Diagnostic Console will be successful.

652667

If there is no Reverse Lookup Pointer (PTR) created for the target Lync 2013 Server in a different domain and users connect the server with its NetBIOS name, the Lync 2013 plug-in of the diagnostic console is unable to get values for some components.

Solution

Add a Reverse Lookup Pointer (PTR) for the Lync 2013 Serve in the “Reverse Lookup Zones” of DNS.

369446

In Data Recorder Mode, if you connect to a Lync 2013 or Skype for Business 2015 Server with the NetBIOS name (such as wm-skp-st), the home page does not display properly. Some components are greyed out in the Diagnostics Console Play Back Mode.

Workaround

Use the server FQDN instead of the NetBIOS name when you connect in Data Recorder Mode.

453310

On Windows Server 2016, when you opened Web Reports, the web site would fail if Internet Explorer was not set as the default browser.

Workaround

Set Internet Explorer as the default browser on the computer that is running Windows Server 2016.

652943

Even though the SMTP Server and SMTP From Address were not configured for a subscription, when the user ran the subscription, the result showed Success.

Always ensure that you have configured the SMTP server and SMTP From Address before you run a report subscription.

652729

On Windows Server 2016, if the account that is running Web Reports is not a domain administrator, the following issues can occur:

Workaround

651422

652856

On Windows Server 2016, when you are creating a custom report in Web Reports, the Preview option does not work correctly for data for a large number groups.

Workaround

651425

Web Reports fail to open from the Management Console (MMC snap-in) if Web Reports is using another web site rather than the default web site with 80 port.

Solution

386971

When UAC is enabled, Web Report pops up an error to say that it has no enough permission to read Web Report related folders, such as, C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\UCDiagnostics\Reports.

Solution

385509

Processor

Processor x86 or x64, running at a minimum speed of 2 GHz

Memory

8 GB

Hard disk space

300 MB on system drive for application.

Historical reporting database requires additional space.

For more information, see the Unified Communications Diagnostics Deployment Guide.

Operating system

One of the following:

Database

One of the following:

Diagnostic Services (Health Tests) for all environments

The following software is required for diagnostic services (health tests) to run on any environment:

Diagnostic Console for all Environments

Web reports

For installing Web Reports, you need one of the following:

For viewing Web Reports, you need:

Requirements for specific operating systems: