Topic Last Modified: 2008-02-28

The Microsoft® Exchange Server Analyzer Tool reads the following registry entry to determine whether Exchange Error Reporting is enabled:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\DisableErrorReporting

If the Exchange Server Analyzer finds the value for DisableErrorReporting is 1, a warning is displayed. A value of 1 indicates that Exchange Error Reporting is disabled.

Support for Microsoft Error Reporting—also known as Windows Error Reporting, Microsoft Event Reporting, and Automatic Error Reporting—was first added with Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack 2. Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2007 includes an enhanced version of Microsoft Error Reporting named Exchange Error Reporting that streamlines error reporting to administrators, integrates with Corporate Error Reporting, and for Exchange Server 2003, provides enhanced reporting for the Exchange Server 2003 Recipient Update Service.

Exchange Error Reporting enables Exchange Server administrators to transmit crashes and other fatal errors through HTTPS over the Internet to a Microsoft error reporting server. It is recommended that you send error reports to Microsoft Online Crash Analysis. Collecting fatal error data from Exchange servers helps the Exchange product team find and fix errors in the software that you use.

If a fatal error occurs while using Exchange System Manager or while performing an Exchange-related task with Active Directory Users and Computers on a computer where Exchange System Manager has been installed, Exchange Error Reporting notifies the administrator about the error, and prompts them if they want to report the error to Microsoft. Additionally, Exchange Error Reporting also traps and reports errors encountered by Microsoft Exchange System Attendant, Microsoft Exchange Information Store, and other Exchange services. Additionally, because errors encountered by the Exchange Server 2003 Recipient Update Service can leave the System Attendant component in a bad state, Exchange Error Reporting for Exchange Server 2003 also reports access violations and other internal faults that occur in the Recipient Update Service.

You can configure each Exchange server to send fatal error information by selecting a box on the server property page in the Exchange Server 2003 Exchange System Manager or the Exchange Server 2007 Exchange Management Console.

To configure Exchange 2000 Server or Exchange Server 2003 to send fatal server error data to Microsoft

  1. Open Exchange System Manager.

  2. Expand Administrative Groups, expand your administrative group, expand Servers, right-click your server, and then click Properties. If the Administrative Groups node is not displayed in Exchange System Manager, expand Servers, right-click your server, and then click Properties.

  3. On the General tab of the <Server Name> Properties page, select the Automatically send fatal service error information to Microsoft box, and then click Apply.

  4. Click Yes to confirm that you want to enable Exchange Error Reporting.

  5. Click OK.

To configure Exchange Server 2007 to send fatal server error data to Microsoft

  1. Open the Exchange Management Console

  2. In the console tree, click Server Configuration.

  3. In the result pane, select the server for which you want to enable error reporting, and then either click Properties in the action pane, or right-click the server name and click Properties.

  4. In <Server Name> Properties, on the General tab, select the Automatically send fatal service error report to Microsoft check box.

When a fatal error is encountered, a compressed error report file is created (typically 10-50 kilobytes). This report contains, among other things, a dump file. A dump file is a file that contains information about the process that experienced the fault. Although faults can occur at a variety of programmatic levels (for example, at the thread level, at the interface level, and at the method or function level), they all occur within the context of a single process. The dump file typically includes information about the faulting process, such as details of what each thread was doing, the various memory areas in use by the process, system information, and other relevant debugging information. With Exchange Server, the error reports also include information about the state of Exchange Server, operating system version information, details about the computer’s hardware, the computer’s IP address, and a digital product ID that is used to identify the product license.

While Microsoft does not intentionally collect personal information, we do acknowledge that some of the collected information could contain information that could be used to uniquely identify your system. However, Microsoft does not use the collected data in this manner, and uses the data only for crash reports and bug fixing. For more information, see the error reporting policy, "Data Collection Policy" (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=33818).