One of the great feature of Lync (and for that matter, OCS too!) is the ability to do comprehensive debug logging. Pretty much, if there's any sort of activity happening in Lync, you can log that activity to help debug issues. For OCS, the ability to see the SIP traffic, on the wire was fantastic (with Wireshark you saw nothing useful as all the traffic was encrypted). I have on many occasions used this logging (and the SIP Snooper tool) to work out what’s going wrong,
With Lync 2013, Microsoft has improved this system significantly, and we now have the Centralised Logging feature. In earlier versions, you had to run the debug logging on each machine independently which made tracing things across machines (e.g. edge, to director, to pool server to client etc.) much more difficult. With centralised logging those issues are a thing of the past as logging can now be done in a centralised fashion (I guess the clue is in the name!).
One issue, for some admins, is that the CLS is based on the use of PowerShell cmdlets or using CLSController.exe. The Lync MVP community, particularly Randly Wintle and James Cussen, had the great idea of making a GUI interface. James took the earlier Lync Preview based tool and has created a much improved version.
For more information, and to snag a copy of this cool tool, you should visit James’ blog: http://www.mylynclab.com/2013/04/lync-2013-centralised-logging-tool.html. I don’t know about the legalities of doing it, but adding this tool to the Lync 2013 Resource Kit would be a really great idea. Nice job James!
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