Configure crash dumps

We recommend that you configure automatic capture of full memory dumps for any process that faults. You can configure crash dumps for any PI node where Windows errors may occur, not just for Data Archive. The information stored in these dumps is critical for analyzing issues with AVEVA™ PI System™, such as a PI process crash.

1. Using regedit (the Windows registry editor), create the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps with the following values.

   Value name	Data type	Value data	Required?
   DumpType	REG_DWORD	2	Yes
   DumpFolder	REG_EXPAND_SZ	%LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps (default)
   DumpCount	REG_DWORD	10 (default)

2. Create a simulated process crash to test the crash dump configuration and ensure it is working as expected.

   1. Open a command prompt and navigate to the folder specific to your machine type:

      Type	Directory
      Data Archive node	%PISERVER%\adm
      32-bit PINS node	%PIHOME%\adm
      64-bit PINS node	%PIHOME64%\adm

   2. At the command prompt, enter:

      pidiag -crash

   3. Check the DumpFolder specified in step 1 (by default, %LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps) for a file named pidiag.exe.ID.dmp, where ID is the process ID of the faulting process.

      Note: The environment variable %LOCALAPPDATA% is specific to each user. The dump is written in the %LocalAppData% folder of the user account where you ran the pidiag command. An example is C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\CrashDumps. You can also configure this environment variable to a location that is common to all users.

3. If a crash dump was not created, enable Windows Error Reporting (WER) and test again.

   See Configure Windows Error Reporting.