Summary
Beginning with TPP 17.1, a new troubleshooting tool called VSC (short for Venafi Support Center) has been included with the TPP installation. This tool is found in the ..\Venafi\Support directory. This tool is able to capture more complete exception information for better troubleshooting of problem situations. This tool is also available as a stand alone package (.msi) for getting new versions, or installing on older versions of TPP.
Solution
When you have a error with a TPP product where it is getting an exception (showing a stack trace) it is often not detailed enough to be useful, or some exceptions have been silently suppressed. In that case, you can use the VSC tool to capture all the exceptions that have happened in a process, and then send that information to Venafi Support to have the detail analyzed for troubleshooting. Steps to gather this information are:
1. Launch a command prompt as administrator, navigate to ..\Venafi\Support directory and launch VSC.exe, or in a Windows Explorer window navigate to ..\Venafi\Support directory and right-click on VSC.exe and select "Run as administrator". NOTE: Administrator privilege is required to see the processes and attach to them for capturing the exceptions, otherwise the "Applications and Processes" option will not appear.
2. In the Applications and Processes tab of the main window, find the process you want to monitor for exceptions. This will likely be one of these: Web Console (Vedadmin and Aperture before 20.1), VPlatform, or LogServer. For this example, we will choose VPlatform. After clicking on the VPlatform line in the display to select and highlight it, click the Monitor (eyeglasses) icon in the command bar at the top of the screen. A new tab will open with details about the VPlatform process.
3 Click the Monitor tab in the main window where the process details for VPlatform are shown. A window showing exception details (empty at this point) will be shown.
4. Now perform the actions that cause the error situation. Return to VSC window, and now the refresh button in the command bar should be enabled. Click it to cause accumulated exception info to be displayed.
5. Click the export button in the command bar, and a file save dialog will appear. Select a location and file name to save the information to, and then send Venafi Support the resulting .xlsx file. This file contains information about your running instance of the process, including loaded dlls, and also all the captured exception stack trace data.
It is possible to monitor more than one process at once, just select the desired process names from the Application and Processed tab and follow the same steps as above. Exporting the captured exceptions will only export one process's information at a time.
NOTE: When Venafi Support Center (VSC) is ran, the exceptions that are captured are stored in memory. Logging out of the Windows account or closing the program will erase all captured data from memory.
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