Create a Custom View in Event Viewer to show Reboot Events

Scenario

A server reboot can explain related events and alarms triggered by monitoring systems, so it’s always handy to check for reboots first when troubleshooting.

With this in mind, you want a quick and easy way of finding out when the server last rebooted.

Solution

You need to create a Custom View in Event Viewer, that will only show shutdown and startup events, including reasons why the server rebooted.

Here’s the steps to create the Custom View:

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When good Domain Controllers go bad!

Scenario

It’s a pleasant day and all is well with the world. Colleagues are skipping around the office with smiles on faces…until…duh duh daaa! One by one, services start failing:

  • Printers go offline:
    • First, for Win7 users
    • Then for all clients
    • Can still print from server though
  • File shares go offline
  • Active Directory replication fails
  • DNS console will not open

Basically, your main Domain Controller (DC) has just taken a dump…and so have you!

These are the steps I took to troubleshoot the issues and get everything back online.

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Hardcore troubleshooting using Logs, Process Monitor, PowerShell and Excel

I’m a huge fan of the Sysinternals Suite – Process Monitor being one of my faves – and am loving using PowerShell to do ever more, but this post is at another level: http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2012/06/01/what-s-causing-that-dfsr-change-storm.aspx

Hopefully I’ll be able to use similar techniques for those really tricky problems that rear their ugly head from time to time. Bring it on!

Reliability Monitor not showing data in Server 2008 R2

I like using the Reliability Monitor to easily show the stability of the server over time. However, sometimes no data is shown at all:

Here’s how to fix it:

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Event Log Error Event ID 23 in Windows Server 2008

Have you ever experienced a stream of Event Log errors using Windows Server 2008?
I have, and they’re really annoying. They typically look like this:

The event logging service encountered an error (res=5) while initializing logging resources for channel PowerShell.

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