View MPSReports

Microsoft have a tool called Microsoft Product Support Reports also known as MPSReports. If you have done a support call to Microsoft in the past, you would have used MPSReports. What MPS Reports does is grab all the config about how your system is setup that is relevant to diagnosing issues, ZIP them up and allow the user to send the information to an IT professional (normally Microsoft).

I personally have been using MPSReports for years. I'd get a client to run MPSReports on their server experiencing problems, then send me the MPSReports results. I'd then dig through all the log files that came packaged up and diagnose the problem. This was very painful however as its hard to know what file contains what information.



The Microsoft support guys have a tool that lets them easily dig through the data generated by MPSReports, a "viewer" tool. I have been asking them on the phone for some time to give us a copy. The response was always "It's a tool designated to Microsoft Support Employee's". I'd be like pleaseeeeeeeeee!!!

Today I saw that as of the 30th of March 2010 Microsoft has made this viewer tool available to the public. It is called Microsoft Product Support Reports Viewer 2.0. Download it from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=fb414a72-ccef-4f14-8c76-b846a0f2182d