We used to use Dr. Watson logfiles and dumps for crash analysis in our production environment, but Dr. Watson is no longer part of server 2k8 and our infrastructure team has had issues getting it running on 2008.
Are there alternatives that can be used in a similar way? In particular, we'd need the faulting module and address causing the crash (we use this with the PDB and map information to backtrace to the faulting location), and it would have to work with windows services (including those running as localsystem).
Thanks for any suggestions.
You can configure Windows Error Reporting to automatically save a dump file locally for you. More information here.
We also have all our server cut off from the outside world. It is beter to collect the data yourself and sent it to Microsoft
You can use Breakpad, which I gather does much the same thing.
Depending on how quickly you need to respond to these things, you can just let Microsoft do the collection for you. You can get crash data from WER, you just have to sign up.