Tips and Tricks – ISA Data Packager Fails to Start

When troubleshooting ISA Server one of the most common procedures in order to understand what is happening behind the scenes is to use the ISA Data Packager tool, which is part of the ISA Best Practices Analyzer, also known as ISABPA. This tool collects data like network traces, configuration state, event logs and ISA configuration. For more information on how to use this tool review the articles below:

Using ISABPA For Proactive And Reactive Work On ISA Server - Part 1

Using ISABPA For Proactive And Reactive Work On ISA Server - Part 2

This post is about a scenario where ISA Data Packager doesn’t run as it should and triggers the following error: “The IsaBpaPack.exe process failed to start” as shown in Figure below:

fail

As you can see this is not a very friendly error, hence we can’t really say why it happens just with that information. However it was noticed, that if we uncheck the option below (Performance Monitor Snapshot) the issue didn’t happen:

IDP_Perf

In this specific case, if you open the performance monitor you would find that all the counters would be empty. The quick solution for this is to rebuild them using the command Lodctr /R as shown below :

lock

After this process ISA Data Packager was able to run successfully.

Author

Gabriel Koren

Microsoft Forefront TMG Test Team

Technical Reviewer

Yuri Diogenes

Sr Security Support Escalation Engineer

Microsoft CSS Forefront (ISA/TMG) Team