PST Flight Deck 9.2 - Administration Guide

Exceptions

Exceptions are instances of failures of some functionality within the product. Mostly identified via monitoring or event review, some level of exceptions occurs in every migration. The details of the exception provide a reason why the exception occurred. If you are able to identify a specific exception, review of the events, Console, or logs will help to better understand the nature of the failure. Log excerpts and collection are typically required for support tickets involving exceptions.

Backlogs

Backlogs are mostly identified by review of the Operations or Files sub-menus. Backlogs can indicate an issue with the environment’s tuning, exceptions, or services which are not running. Backlogs take place after a file has been centralized and it is already located on the local machine. The modules responsible for processing these files may have more work than they are able to process in the time allocated. Additional sizing or tuning may be required to eliminate the bottleneck and get the system caught up again. Bottlenecks not investigated or resolved are likely to recur as the migration continues.

Point of Failure

When discussing details about an issue, a common area of interest is the “point of failure”. This is the exact point in time that the issue occurs, where it occurs, and under what conditions. The idea of determining the point of failure is to ultimately find a means by which to reproduce the issue being observed. Once any issue can be reproduced on demand, it is infinitely easier to work towards a solution. For troubleshooting, the identification of a point of failure means that we are able to reproduce the issue, collect applicable logs, sample items, and make assessments on if the issue is environmental or not. In most instances, we can collect samples that are provided to our Support team for analysis. This frequently expedites the troubleshooting of an issue and results in a drastically shortened time to resolution.

Logging

PST Flight Deck has very robust logging features that enable administrators to effectively troubleshoot problems. There are several categories of logs – agent logs, server logs and installation. Agent logs are generated by the Migration Agent and are stored on a user’s computer. Agent logging is enabled by default. Server logs are generated by the various PST Flight Deck modules and the Core. Server logging is disabled by default. Installation logs can be found at /appdata/local/temp/InstallLogs.zip