14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Premier Services customers can take advantage of a free tool offered by the Redmond company in order to streamline the harvesting of diagnostics information from the Windows machines in their organization.
While the Microsoft Premier Field Engineering Platform Reporting Tool (MPS_REPORTS) is bound to be familiar to some of the companies tapping the software giant for support, since it’s not exactly a new release, the latest update was published earlier this week.
With MPS_REPORTS, Microsoft is offering customers with Premier Services agreements a batch utility set up to streamline the troubleshooting process for problems related to Windows.
“MPS_REPORTS is a compressed software package that contains one or more scripts and other utilities that you can use to capture critical system, diagnostic, and configuration information about your computer,” the company explained in the Knowledge Base article accompanying the tool.
The Microsoft Premier Field Engineering team leverages the data collected with the help of the utility in a variety of scenarios such as fault isolation in the case of problems, but also routine health-checks.
According to the software giant, the PFE version of MPS_REPORTS plays nice with supported versions of the Windows operating system, but it’s also capable of gathering troubleshooting data, albeit only to a limited extent, from SQL Server and Exchange Server.
Essentially, the MPS Reporting Tool comes with support for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2.
“This reporting utility DOES NOT make any registry changes to the operating system and is entirely a batch command utility. There are files extracted during run-time as the utility is running,” the software giant stated.
“The reports gathered are compressed into a ".cab" file and then deleted. The compressed .cab file is normally 2-5 MB depending on the system configuration and is therefore easy to transfer in case the data is needed for analysis.”
The Microsoft Premier Field Engineering Platform Reporting Tool (MPS_REPORTS) is available for download here.