Steps to enable Exchange 2007 store tracing for calendar issues

Source: Microsoft Support

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For most issues related to Outlook and Exchange calendaring, you will need to gather and provide a lot of data for the Microsoft support engineer to effectively troubleshoot the issue. This is primarily due to the complexity of the Calendar feature set in Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server, and the varied scenarios and products that touch the data on a calendar.

The complete set of data that needs to be gathered to troubleshoot calendar issues is listed in the following article.

 Working with support to troubleshoot the Outlook calendar in an Exchange environment: Part of the data that needs to be gathered is an Exchange Store log for a user. This article provides detailed steps on how to enable Exchange 2007 Store tracing for troubleshooting issues related to an Outlook Calendar.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

The intent of this article is to simplify the calendar logging process when you work with the support team at Microsoft. It is not intended to provide you complete information to perform store logging on your own. There is a risk of causing performance problems on your Exchange server if logging is not enabled correctly, which is why you need to work with the support team during this process.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 has the ability to trace calendar activities that happen in the store. This tracing is done through the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant (ExTRA) and the tracing can be done on a per-user or a per-server basis.

The following steps explain how this tracing feature can be enabled when you work with a Microsoft support engineer on a support case related to calendar issues.

Enabling Exchange tracing for calendar issues
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1. Identify the user whose mailbox will be traced by this process.
   
   NOTE: For performance considerations, you should always identify one user who is encountering the issue and then trace only their mailbox using per-user tracing.
2. Start ExTRA by clicking Run on the Start menu and then entering the following command-line:
   
   Extra.exe
3. On the “Welcome to the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant” page click Select a task.
4. On the “Troubleshooting Task Selection Screen” page click Trace Control.
5. Click OK to the following prompt alerting you about possible performance problems running a trace:
   
   Enabling traces can cause performance degradation and should only be done under the supervision of a qualified Exchange expert.
6. On the “Configure Trace File” page configure the following options:
   Trace file location (the default location is C:\Documents and Settings\<username>)
   
   · Trace file name (the default name is ExchangeDebugTraces.etl)
   
   · Maximum trace file size (recommended size is 100 MB)
   
   · Sequential logging (enabled)
   
   · Run traces for:  0 seconds (this will keep tracing running until you manually stop tracing)
7. After configuring the options in step 6, click Set manual trace tags.
8. On the “Set Trace Tags Manually” page:
   1. configure the following settings:
      i.    Trace Types: PFD, Fatal, Error, Warning
      
      ii.    Components to Trace: Store
      
      iii.    Trace Tags:

      tagCalendarChange
      
      tagCalendarDelete
      
      tagMtgMessageChange
      
      tagMtgMessageDelete
      NOTE: There are many other tags you can enable for store tracing; however, the above trace tags have been found to be the most useful for diagnosing the majority of calendar issues.
   2. Click Show mailbox trace filtering options and then,
      i.    Enter the name of the mailbox to be traced in the Mailbox edit box.
      
      ii.    Enable the UserDN check box.
      
      iii.    Click Resolve Mailbox.
   3. Click Start Tracing at the bottom of the page.

At this point, you are now waiting for the calendar problem to occur for the user. After the user experiences the problem with their calendar, proceed with the steps in the next section.

Stopping Exchange tracing
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Once the calendar issue has occurred while Store tracing was enabled you can use the following steps to disable Store tracing.

1. On the “Trace Control” page in the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant click Stop tracing now.
2. Note the location of the .etl file that is specified on the “Trace Control” page.
   
   The location of the file is the file location specified in step 6 of the previous section.
3. Click Exit.
   
   NOTE: Clicking Exit is very important. Otherwise, the contents of the trace are not written to the .etl file and you will have to repeat this process.
4. When the “View Results” page appears, please close the Microsoft Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant window.
5. Provide the .etl file to the Microsoft support engineer working with you on your calendar issue.

NOTE: The .etl file is a binary file and can only be converted using tools available to Microsoft support engineers.

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