I am actively searching for a managed services application that can monitor Microsoft OneDrive for Business on a Windows pc.

 

Imagine a user out there working on their Windows laptop WITHOUT an internet connection.  They save their data into a Microsoft OneDrive for Business folder that is set to sync back to Microsoft's SharePoint online document library.  When the user regains their internet connection, the OneDrive for Business Sync Client (a little blue cloud)  is supposed to connect to SharePoint online and sync the user's data back to the Organizations data store in SharePoint Online.

 

But occasionally this sync breaks and the little blue cloud icon gets either a yellow exclamation mark or a red "X" on it.  THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO MONITOR!

 

When the OneDrive for Business sync client is out of sync (indicated by either a yellow exclamation mark or red "X"), you can right-mouse click on the icon in the Windows SYS tray and select "View sync problems...".  This reads a file on the local Windows computer at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\Spw\logs - the files are called something like  "mso-4644-groove.exe-20150321.0556"  or "EtwTraces-150401104144-1.etl".  Microsoft refers to these files as "ring" files.

 

I have attached one of these "ring" files (I renamed the file Terry.txt for the purposes of this upload) that does indeed have a sync problem (I created the problem deliberately)with the file called "Terry#365.pptx"  in the SharePoint library named "TBSSA - Documents".  Open the attached file with Notepad, and search on "T e r r y # 3 6 5"  and also search on "C : \ U s e r s \ t l a w \ S h a r e P o i n t \ T B S S A   -   D o c u m e n t s"  (I have no idea why there are spaces in there).

 

Can Pulseway provide an agent that I can somehow use to monitor the Windows OneDrive for Business sync client and alert me (when the user re-connects to the internet, of course) when that sync client is out of sync?
 

terry.txt

Hi Terry,

 

Welcome to the Pulseway community. We've checked the attached file and it's not what we expected. Have you attached the ETL file or the msi-* file?

 

Regards,

Chris

Pulseway Support

The name of the file that I attached in my previous post is "EtwTraces-150401104144-1.etl".  On my own pc, I have around 2,000 of these files - their names all begin with "EtwTraces-YYMMDD" (Year, Month, Day).  But I have seen other file names listed on web posts, but on my pc's I only see EtwTraces files, some end with .etl and some end with .etl.z

 

If you are interested in setting up your own test environment, I would be pleased to assist you.  If you provide a "virgin" Windows 7 pc, I will provide you with a legit Microsoft OneDrive for Business license, instructions on how to install it, and then how to easily create an "out of sync" situation to test.

Hi Terry,

 

We will configure a vanilla Windows 7 x64 VM and we will contact you for more information.

 

Regards,

Chris

Pulseway Support

Hi guys!  Any word?  I'd like to keep moving on this . . . . .

Hi Terry,

 

We had our development team investigate the technical implications required to achieve the feature you requested and we reached the conclusion that since you can only collect sync errors through a textual file (etl.z) or an event file (etl which only contains event identifiers). String parsing on large files is a CPU consuming task that takes a long time to execute and can break fast if the software changes the log message format.

 

We've learned that ETL files can become as large as 800GB+ which would take more than a couple of hours to parse them.

 

Unless Microsoft exposes any form of API, we cannot add such feature to Pulseway. String parsing is not a valid solution.

 

Regards,

Chris

Pulseway Support

I wonder if it would be possible to actually look at the graphic of the sync icon in the sys tray.  There are only 3 possibilities: 

• blue cloud - all is good
• blue cloud with yellow exclamation mark - sync problem
• blue cloud with red X - sync problem

Basically, you would just be "looking" at the sys tray.  Could this be possible?

 

I really want to figure out a way to monitor our One Drive for Business sync app.  We only need to monitor two conditions:  1) All is good, or 2) yellow exclamation mark or red X

Hi Terry,

 

Comparing an app icon is not a viable solution as well because the icon may not always start at the same location. Why not ask Microsoft to provide a public API for this?

 

Regards,

Chris

Pulseway Support

Hi, would this information be helpful?

 

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/api/files-rest-operations