Great tool for Help Desk/System Admintrator Professionals – Change Analysis Diagnostic tool

Posted on March 30, 2007 at 8:16 pm

I just found a very cool tool released by Microsoft this week called the Change Analysis Diagonstic tool, which track changes made to specific parts of the operating system. The tool is for support professionals who want to know what changes were made to a system before it started having problems, so that they can narrow down what things to troubleshoot.

Nowadays, users are able to install programs, change browser settings, fool with the OS configuration, etc that it makes it very difficult to troubleshoot a task sometimes. Unless of course you have all your computers locked down, but then they’ll complain they can’t get any work done!

The Change Analysis Diagnostic tool is especially helpful because of the following issues:• Users may not be aware of recent changes to their computers.
• Users may not understand the relevance of recent changes.
• Users may be frustrated when support professionals ask them for detailed system information.
• Users may be unable to provide accurate information about recent changes.
• The user takes a long time to read computer information over the telephone.

The problems may result from updates, new software installations, or changes in hardware. The Change Analysis Diagnostic tool scans the computer for a specified date range that you choose (7 days, 14 days) and gives you an analysis of the following areas:

1. Software programs: Any programs added or removed on the OS
2. Operating system components: Includes updates and hotfixes info
3. Browser helper objects: COM components that IE loads
4. Drivers: Kernel-mode and file system drivers
5. ActiveX controls: COM objects downloaded through IE used on web pages
6. Other Auto-Start Extensibility Points: Programs that start without actions from the user

The tool then generates a XML file that can be loaded up in IE to view. You can download the tool here.

Once downloaded, in order to run the tool, you have to click on Start and then Run and type in statechangediag.exe and click OK.

Click Next and you can choose the interval you want to scan for. You can even pick the exact dates you want by choosing “Choose from calendar”:

The Change Analysis Diagonstic tool will take a couple of minutes to run and once you get to 100%, click Next.

Click View Report and the report will be loaded into your default XML reader. For some reason my computer opened it in Notepad, which was all gibberish, so I had to manually open it from IE.

Now you can browse through your new report which is broken into the sections talked about above! Great tool for help desk support teams or support pros who are not in the same building as their customers.