Monitoring Collects Desktop Errors

Centralized monitoring of OS crashes and unexpected application terminations (known as “Dr. Watson” errors) is provided by Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM), which aggregates error-related activity across an organization’s Windows clients.

Reporting on PC Software Crashes

DEM is a scaled-down edition (i.e., subset) of Microsoft’s Operations Manager (OM) 2007 monitoring product and uses OM 2007’s Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) feature, along with a SQL Server database, to collect and store data about client-side OS and application crashes and unexpected terminations. No monitoring agent need be installed on client machines; administrators configure Group Policy to instruct the Windows Error Reporting modules built into Windows 2000, XP, and Vista to redirect error data to the organization’s own DEM server instead of to Microsoft. Error data can include information such as application name and version, pertinent Registry values, memory dumps, and the names of all drivers loaded at the time of the crash.