Technet content for troubleshooting MSMQ on Windows 2008 and Vista

  • Article

I'm slightly embarrassed to be sharing this content with you as its dated June 2007 and I've only just noticed that its there.

There are two main blocks of content. The first is the Message Queuing Troubleshooting Guide which contains two sections:

  1. Things to Check When Troubleshooting Message Queuing
  2. Troubleshooting Message Queuing Problems

Amongst the things to check, there are the obvious (generic):

  • Check the Windows event logs for errors and warnings (Event Viewer)
  • Verify computer connectivity (Ping, Network Monitor)
  • Determine resource usage (Performance Monitor)

... the not-so-obvious (MSMQ-specific):

  • Understand message size limits
  • Understand threading limitations
  • Avoid message capacity thresholds

... and the new (in MSMQ 4.0): 

  • Use End-to-end tracing to troubleshoot problems with message delivery

Hopefully you are a regular reader of this blog and only the last one is news. 
Scroll down to see the link to Technet content for end-to-end tracing.

The Guide's second section - "Troubleshooting Message Queuing Problems" - looks suspiciously similar to the other block of content I mentioned which is in fact an Internet-based copy of the Installed Help:

Troubleshooting Message Queuing contains four sections:

The first three sections contain pretty simple Q&A for common problems but the last one, Troubleshooting by Using End-to-End Tracing, is of more interest.

End-to-end tracing provides valuable information to help troubleshoot problems with message delivery. It tracks the path of a message through its life cycle, from the time that an application sent it to the time that:

  • An application uses the message.
  • The message is deleted because of an error.
  • The message is put in a dead-letter queue.

After a message has been sent, you can look at correlated activities and determine where the message is and why it is there.

What the content needs is some examples so (once I've actually tried this feature out) I'll post some screenshots in a future post and talk through what you can see.