Friday, November 18, 2011

Journal Files - Get to the Point Quick

The Revit Clinic's Kathryn Langan is sharing a little application that she wrote to make it easy to extract the basic information they like to review before they dig deeply into a support issue. Thanks for sharing, so go check it out!

I've clipped some of the info in her post:

...snip
Last weekend I wasn't feeling that great, and decided to play around with some scripting while we were just sitting around watching football. What I ended up with was a Journal File Parser, and I think it turned out to be useful enough to share.
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What it does, is parses through a folder of journal files and pulls out the following:

  • Journal File Name
  • Start Date & Time
  • Username
  • Revit Build
  • Hardware Acceleration Status
  • Graphics Card
  • Graphics Driver
  • Operating System
  • Last Memory Usage Statistics
  • Last Entry Line

It takes all of this information and populates it into an Excel file.

So how is this useful?

When someone comes to us with a Revit problem, one of the first things we want to do is check the basics. Are users on the latest build? Do they have certified graphics cards? Are the correct drivers installed? Instead of having to open individual journal files to check all of these things, a single run of the script will pull out all of the information. Even if users aren't having problems, it could be used as a quick audit to make sure everyone is on the same build, has the same drivers, etc.

In addition, if a user is crashing, this can help us understand which journals to look at, and to eliminate memory as a suspect. The Last Memory Line will tell us how much memory was left the last time Revit reported it in the journal. So if the available RAM is really low, we'll be able to quickly identify it. If a user experienced an issue but they weren't sure which journal recorded it, we can quickly verify the Start Date/Times of the journals to be able to narrow down the right files faster. Also, if the Last Entry Line ends with 0:< finished recording journal file, that session probably wasn't a crash, so we can focus on the sessions that ended unexpectedly without having to open each one to check.
...snip

CLICK TO see the POST

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Along similar lines, you may be interested in:
Free Revit Journal Analysis Program (Keyboard Shortcut Use)
and
Revit Journal Analyzer - boost your productivity!

Both were posted in March 2011.