Well, how do we troubleshoot these issues in Exchange 2013? Let’s turn on Diagnostic Logging! But wait…. where is it? It’s not in the ‘GUI’ or EAC if you will… you need to program this via PowerShell. Of all the things I get complaints about, this is the biggest. Simple features that would be much easier to point, click and change like we did in 5.5, 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010…. now we need PowerShell. To tell the truth I am a fan of Powershell; just not for cases like this.
Turning on Diagnostic Logging for Active Sync
Active Sync has two Event Logs you can turn on – Active Sync Requests and Active Sync Configuration. For now we can just turn on the Requests one since we are dealing with the random user issues and not all users. To turn on Diagnostic Logging for Active Sync requests you can first check the current level with:
- get-eventloglevel “MSExchange ActiveSync\Requests”
If this is set to the default level, you will see the following:
0 = Lowest for Event Log levels. Now, depending on your comfort/experience level, you can either set the logging to 5 (high) or 7 (expert). Let’s set it to 5 for now:
Once we do that we should get some events to look at in the event log like this:
In the case of my ActiveSync issue, the account I was using had administrative rights and thus needed the Inherit rights checkbox checked before the first successful sync takes place. After that is done I should see no more Active Sync issues with this particular user.
After completing your troubleshooting, remember to reset the event log level to 0 to reduce server load.
Just for reference, the following numbers are valid for Event Log Levels:
-
0 – Lowest
1 – Low
3 – Medium
5 – High
7 – Expert
