How to Troubleshoot Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2010 using Performance Monitor Data Collector Sets

When dealing with Business Connectivity Services (BCS) errors (especially if they are occurring on Offline clients such as Outlook), the Event Log and SharePoint ULS Logs don't give you the whole picture.

To get a full verbose breakdown as to why your configuration or code is generating errors, you need to use Windows Performance Monitor (perfmon) to generate a verbose trace to get the full details and stack traces that are often needed to diagnose issues.

To set up an Event Trace on BCS you can do the following:

1. Start Up Performance Monitor by typing "perfmon" at the Windows Start Prompt.
   
   
2. In Windows Performance Monitor, Expand the "User Defined Node" and then Right-Click and Choose "New Collector Set"
   
   
3. In the First Screen of the Wizard, Name the Collector Set (e.g. BCSCollectorSet). Choose the "Create Manually (Advanced)" radio button.
4. When asked "What type of data do you want to include?", choose "Event Trace Data"
   
   
5. When asked "Which event trace providers would you like to enable?", select the "Microsoft-Office-Business Connectivity Services" and the "Microsoft-SharePoint-Products-Business Connectivity Services" providers. If you are using Duet Enterprise, you may also want to add the "Duet Enterprise" Event Provider.
   
   
6. Click "Finish" to Leave the other settings at the defaults.
7. Start your trace by clicking on your collector set and clicking the play icon.
   
8. Once the trace is recorded, you can then open up the logs and view them in Windows Event Viewer by clicking on "Open Saved Log" and pointing to your newly created BCS Event trace file.
   
   

If found this particularly useful when troubleshooting BCS Offline Caching issues on Outlook clients.

The event trace indicated that an old version of my BCS models and connections was being used to the Duet/SAP system.

To resolve my problem, I had to remove all instances of the BCS lists in Outlook by uninstalling Data Lists and Solutions that refer to that one SharePoint 2010 External Content Type. This resolved my caching problems and it stopped giving me "Access Denied" Exceptions when Synching with Outlook 2010.

 

DDK