Retrieving Crash Dumps

For titles built with the February 2014 XDK or later, we automatically collect a subset of crash information for titles from retail consoles and development kits, and transmit them in the background to the Xbox telemetry services. Only triage dumps are available, triage dumps are small and include only the callstacks, the module list, etc. Triage dumps are kilobytes in size whereas full dumps would be gigabytes in size. Note that only a subset of all crash dumps are collected. The heuristics used to determine which crash dumps to collect are intended to provide a representative sample of crash dumps and are not intended for analyzing crashes individually.

In the future, these will be available via a self-serve website. For now, these crash dumps are available by request to help diagnose issues. If you need to diagnose a crash that occurred on a Retail customer’s Xbox One console, contact your developer account manager (DAM) and provide some or all of the following information:

• The SCID, Content ID and Product ID of your title.
• The rough time and date when the crash occurred.
• The name of the executable file and any DLLs that are running for your title.
• Any other information that you think is relevant to the crash you are seeing.

These details will help us retrieve the crash dump faster.

Local Crash Dump Support

Starting with the February 2016 Xbox One XDK, you can collect crash dumps on your local development kit instead of sending them to Watson. These crash dumps are written to your title’s scratch drive. You can configure your title to collect the following types of local crash dumps using Developer Home on the Console (Dev Home) Preview, Xbox One Manager, or the Configuration (xbconfig.exe) tool:

• None: No local crash dumps are collected.
• Triage: Collects stack traces for all threads, active OS handles, thread information, and information on unloaded modules. Triage dumps are scrubbed of personally identifiable information (PII).
• Mini: Collects data segments from all loaded modules, security token related data, thread information, and information on the unloaded modules. Mini dumps are not scrubbed of PII.
• Heap: Provides a full user-mode crash dump of all processes and memory running in the game OS. Although this option provides the most information, it can take a few minutes to write out all of the data.

Additionally, Windows Error Reporting (WER) APIs are provided that allow developers to specify additional crash artifacts (e.g. game logs) to be collected at crash time, along with the crash dump files. Each of the files registered using WerRegisterFile will be copied and uploaded along with the crash dump file. If local dumps are enabled, the registered files will get copied to the title scratch drive, alongside the crash dump file.

For more information on WER reference, see WER API Reference

See also

Development Environment