Windows Agent Troubleshooting

Environments

Hosts

Sysdig Windows agent consists of two Windows services:

  1. Sysdig Connection Manager
  2. Sysdig Security Manager

These services are configured to automatically restart when terminated. In case either of these services restarts frequently, a possible cause could be an Agent service crash. In order to troubleshoot such crashes, Microsoft Windows supports generating process memory dumps. The steps to enable program specific crash dumps can be found in Collecting User-Mode Dumps.

The agent logs for both the processes are available in the installation directory. This is typically C:\Program Files\Sysdig\Agent\Logs.

Windows registry configuration for collecting agent crash dumps

Following configuration enables dumps for Sysdig Windows agent services with type Full dump. The dump file count per service is limited to 10.

Command Line

Please ensure the following commands are run as local administrator.

reg.exe add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\connmgr.exe" /v DumpFolder /t REG_SZ /d "%PROGRAMFILES%\Sysdig\Agent\Dumps" /f

reg.exe add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\connmgr.exe" /v DumpType /t REG_DWORD /d 2 /f

reg.exe add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\connmgr.exe" /v DumpCount /t REG_DWORD /d 10 /f

reg.exe add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\secmgr.exe" /v DumpFolder /t REG_SZ /d "%PROGRAMFILES%\Sysdig\Agent\Dumps" /f

reg.exe add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\secmgr.exe" /v DumpType /t REG_DWORD /d 2 /f

reg.exe add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\secmgr.exe" /v DumpCount /t REG_DWORD /d 10 /f

Graphical UI

  1. Launch Windows Registry Editor regedit.exe as administrator.

  2. Navigate to the following registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps.

  3. Right click on LocalDumps and select New -> Key and rename the new key to connmgr.exe.

  4. Right click on connmgr.exe key and select New -> String Value and rename the new string value to DumpFolder.

  5. Double click the DumpFolder value and set the value to %PROGRAMFILES%\Sysdig\Agent\Dumps.

  6. Right click on connmgr.exe key and select New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value and rename the new DWORD value to DumpType.

  7. Double click the DumpType value and set the value to 2.

  8. Right click on connmgr.exe key and select New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value and rename the new DWORD value to DumpCount.

  9. Double click the DumpCount value and set the value to 10.

Please repeat the above process for secmgr.exe.

Dump Files

The generated dump file names are in the format of {connmgr|secmgr}.exe.{pid}.dmp.