When you experience an AOS crash it is difficult to know what tool to use to determine what is happening. One tool that we use in support is adPlus as it gathers information about what was happening in memory at the time of an AOS crash. This tool takes the memory of the AOS (ax32serv.exe) and rights it to a file with an extension of .dmp. The support team can then get in those .dmp files and analyze them to see what is happening.
Here are the steps to follow to collect a memory dump from an AOS crash.
The knowledge base article 286350 is about how to use ADPlus. The article can be accessed from: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/286350
In that knowledge base article you have the following link to install the tool. You can go to the ‘Where do you obtain ADPlus’ and click on the link http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx and then click on the option called Install Debugging Tools for Windows 32-bit Versions or Install Debugging Tools for Windows 64-bit Versions depending on the operating system of the AOS machine.
Here are the steps to run the tool specific to Dynamics:
1) Create a folder on C: called ‘AXDumpLog’
2) Turn off ALL AOS instances except for the Production.
3) Open a command prompt.
4) Change the directory to: ‘C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows’
5) Type the following script: adplus -crash -pn Ax32Serv.exe -o c:\AXDumpLog
6) This program will monitor the AOS services. When it crashes, it will write a dump file to c:\AXDumpLog
7) Send us the contents of this folder in a zip file.
After you start adplus there are a few things you should know:
1) When you run adplus you will get a message about symbol files. You can click past that message as Dynamics AX support will attach the symbol files when we get the dump file from you.
2) You will likely get prompted to change your scripting host, if you say no adplus will not run.
3) Once you have started adplus you do not want to close the command prompt or the scripting host. If you do that will cause the AOS to crash.
With ADplus each time that you restart the AOS you have to start ADPlus so it will attach to the process. Also when the AOS does crash it can take some time for the information that is in memory to write to disk. You will want to wait until you have the .dmp file to restart the AOS.