BES Logs ... What's in them? Part 15 of 20 (OutOfCoverage.exe BRK Tool)

Welcome to Part 15 of the 20 part series looking at the BES logs (Part 14) ... the BRK Tool OutOfCoverage.exe (OOC).

Simply put, the OutofCoverage.exe BRK tool checks for BlackBerry users that do not send or receive data in a specified period of time. To utilize OOC you need only the BlackBerry Dispatcher log and the tool itself. The OOC tool parses the DISP log, and while I can't speak to the exact logic it uses when parsing I can tell you how the output it creates correlates to the data in the BlackBerry Dispatcher log. The actual output is comma separated, so unlike the PhoneCall / PIN / SMS logs you don't need to do any Unicode to ANSI conversion to read them easily in Excel.

Like all BRK tools the version of the tool needs to match the version of the logfile it is processing. In the example below, I've got logs from an Exchange BES 4.1 SP6. Don't forget, all command line driven, so open up a command prompt and cd to the directory where you've got the log file and tool.

Syntax

First, we look at the actual syntax of the command. The required elements are the platform, users, and length of outage. In my example below I'm using an Exchange log wanting to get a report for all users that have had a 10 minute outage or longer. When I'm looking for a specific user I'll insert just that email address instead of using the all flag. The output comes a little bit quicker ... but for my test here the DISP log was 13.5MB for 114 total users and processed in 10 seconds; so we're not talking much time either way.



Result

Below is the output for just testuser1@port3101.org. Had I ran the command OutOfCoverage.exe -p E -u testuser1@port3101.org -t 10 this would have been all of the output in the file, so I simply filtered out the user data for this example. Note the first row of data; the Start time and the Stop time indicate when the outage started and stopped. In other words the device was out of coverage during this time. I've found myself explaining the usage of Start/Stop several times ... so we're clear, right?



Raw Data from DISP Log

As promised, here is how it all correlates with a snip from the DISP log (remember, the outage started at 12:07AM and ended at 4:10AM):
____________________
[30308] (07/01 00:27:09.062):{0xDBC} [BIPPa] {Test User1} Forwarding data to BES Agent (s99999999_001), size=49, intTag=1854081, Tag=9724754
[30311] (07/01 00:27:09.078):{0xDC0} {Test User1} Forwarding status to relay, intTag=1854081, Tag=9774714, Status=1
[30450] (07/01 00:37:11.937):{0xE28} {Test User1} User unchanged (disp): id=155, email=testuser1@port3101.org, device=FFFFFFFF, routing=s99999999, agent=001, time=42D4C217, ext=1, wl=0, keys=(A:A:0)
[30450] (07/01 00:59:59.937):{0xDBC} {Test User1} User unchanged (disp): id=155, email=testuser1@port3101.org, device=FFFFFFFF, routing=s99999999, agent=001, time=42D4C217, ext=1, wl=0, keys=(A:A:0)
[30450] (07/01 01:23:40.937):{0xDCC} {Test User1} User unchanged (disp): id=155, email=testuser1@port3101.org, device=FFFFFFFF, routing=s99999999, agent=001, time=42D4C217, ext=1, wl=0, keys=(A:A:0)
[30450] (07/01 01:52:40.937):{0xE08} {Test User1} User unchanged (disp): id=155, email=testuser1@port3101.org, device=FFFFFFFF, routing=s99999999, agent=001, time=42D4C217, ext=1, wl=0, keys=(A:A:0)
[30450] (07/01 02:20:37.937):{0xDFC} {Test User1} User unchanged (disp): id=155, email=testuser1@port3101.org, device=FFFFFFFF, routing=s99999999, agent=001, time=42D4C217, ext=1, wl=0, keys=(A:A:0)
[30450] (07/01 02:49:50.937):{0xDF0} {Test User1} User unchanged (disp): id=155, email=testuser1@port3101.org, device=FFFFFFFF, routing=s99999999, agent=001, time=42D4C217, ext=1, wl=0, keys=(A:A:0)
[30450] (07/01 03:07:09.937):{0xE10} {Test User1} User unchanged (disp): id=155, email=testuser1@port3101.org, device=FFFFFFFF, routing=s99999999, agent=001, time=42D4C217, ext=1, wl=0, keys=(A:A:0)
[30450] (07/01 03:26:25.937):{0xE28} {Test User1} User unchanged (disp): id=155, email=testuser1@port3101.org, device=FFFFFFFF, routing=s99999999, agent=001, time=42D4C217, ext=1, wl=0, keys=(A:A:0)
[30450] (07/01 03:42:45.937):{0xDBC} {Test User1} User unchanged (disp): id=155, email=testuser1@port3101.org, device=FFFFFFFF, routing=s99999999, agent=001, time=42D4C217, ext=1, wl=0, keys=(A:A:0)
[30450] (07/01 04:06:08.937):{0xE10} {Test User1} User unchanged (disp): id=155, email=testuser1@port3101.org, device=FFFFFFFF, routing=s99999999, agent=001, time=42D4C217, ext=1, wl=0, keys=(A:A:0)
[30222] (07/01 04:10:14.484):{0xDF0} {Test User1} MFH: contentType=sync, sizeOTA=146, sizeOTW=73, TransactionId=-1042494417, Tag=9375128
____________________

The outage consists of the entire time around the log lines that included User unchanged (disp). Plain and simple, but aren't you glad there is a tool to parse all that for you?

If you've got any questions about the OutOfCoverage BRK Tool feel free to post a question / comment in response to this post, or in the forum.

Tomorrow in Part 16 we'll continue with another BlackBerry Resource Kit (BRK) tool that I use on a regular basis, Pending.exe ... I have a feeling everyone will figure out what this one does too.