Creating a Support Package for Symantec Management Agent troubleshooting

Products

• IT Management Suite
• Client Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

The Symantec Management Agent is having some issues and errors. Is there a way of collecting what is the most relevant information and logs from the client machine that can be shared with the support team?

Environment

ITMS 8.x

Resolution

With recent releases (at least since ITMS 8.1 release and later), there is an option available for the Symantec Management Agent (also known as Altiris Agent or SMA) that can help our customers to provide relevant information to our support team:

Under the Agent UI toolbar -> Help -> Create Full Support Package.

This will create a memory dump and include all the XMLs, logs, policies, windows logs, etc. available on the client machine.

When using "Create Full Support Package", it will create an encrypted "ez2" file using a name convention like this one: full_support_pkg_{1D07B5A5-BA84-460B-A3BF-854A69DC9598}.ez2.  This file will be saved under the "C:\ProgramData\Symantec\Symantec Agent\CrashDumps" directory.

In order to extract its content, you will need to use SMADumpDecoder.exe (found on the SMP Server, under C:\Program Files\Altiris\Notification Server\Bin\Tools) to decode the file.

How to decode the file:

1. Grab the newly created support package

2. Copy it over to the SMP Server

3. Drag the support package over the SMADumpDecoder.exe (a command prompt will appear, and you should be able to see the extraction progress):

4.  On the same directory where the Support package resides, a new folder with the same name will be created, with a name something like "full_support_pkg_{1D07B5A5-BA84-460B-A3BF-854A69DC9598}.embedded".

All of the extracted files will be there:

AeXConnectionMonitorLog2.xml
AeXCrashHistory.log
AeXLastBasicInventory.xml
Agent Installation Logs (last one and if any previous installation attempts)
AeXSWDPolicy.xml
AeXUserMonitorLog.xml
Agent Logs
Application.evtx
notificationlist.xml
schedule log.xml
Security.evtx
System.evtx
User-based client configuration policy XML
client configuration policy XML