Troubleshooting Server Unavailability due to Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP)
As an IT professional, I have encountered various issues in my daily monitoring of our server infrastructure. However, one particular issue stood out recently – two of our servers were unavailable during the night, and this was not an isolated incident as it had happened the night before as well. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the cause of the unavailability was due to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). In this blog post, I will delve into the details of what CEIP is, how it caused our server issues, and how to opt out of it to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.
What is CEIP?
The Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) is a program that collects anonymized data from Windows Server machines to help Microsoft improve their products and services. The program is enabled by default when you install Windows Server 2012 R2, and it runs three scheduled tasks each night to upload your anonymized data to Microsoft.
How did CEIP cause our server issues?
Upon further investigation, I found that the exact same event was logged on both servers at the time they were unavailable to our monitoring system. After a quick search, I discovered that the issue was caused by the CEIP scheduled tasks running on both servers. The tasks were scheduled to run every night, and they were causing our servers to become unavailable for a short period each night.
How to opt out of CEIP?
To opt out of CEIP and prevent similar issues from occurring in the future, you can follow these steps:
1. Open Server Manager on your Windows Server machine.
2. Go to Local Server, and click on the link behind Customer Experience Improvement Program.
3. In the window that pops up, you will see a radio button labeled “Yes, I want to participate in the CEIP.” Click on this button to toggle it off, so it reads “No, I don’t want to participate.”
4. Click OK to save your changes.
After opting out of CEIP, the scheduled tasks will no longer run, and your servers should no longer become unavailable each night. However, as mentioned earlier, simply opting out of CEIP does not actually prevent the scheduled tasks from running. To fully disable them, you need to disable them through the task scheduler or, even better, disable them through PowerShell.
Update 11/07: Disabling CEIP Scheduled Tasks
As mentioned earlier, simply opting out of CEIP does not actually prevent the scheduled tasks from running. To fully disable them, you need to disable them through the task scheduler or, even better, disable them through PowerShell. Here are the steps to disable the CEIP scheduled tasks:
1. Open Task Scheduler on your Windows Server machine.
2. Go to Task Scheduler Library, and find the Microsoft\Windows\Application Experience folder.
3. Right-click on the task you want to disable (in this case, it’s the three scheduled tasks that run each night), and select Disable.
4. Confirm that you want to disable the task by clicking OK.
Alternatively, you can use PowerShell to disable the CEIP scheduled tasks. Here are the steps:
1. Open PowerShell on your Windows Server machine.
2. Run the following command to disable the first scheduled task: Get-ScheduledTask -TaskPath “\Microsoft\Windows\Application Experience\DiagTrack” | Disable-ScheduledTask
3. Repeat step 2 for the second and third scheduled tasks.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we have discussed an issue that caused two of our servers to become unavailable each night. The cause of the issue was due to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), which runs three scheduled tasks each night to collect anonymized data from Windows Server machines. To prevent similar issues from occurring in the future, we have shown how to opt out of CEIP and disable its scheduled tasks through Task Scheduler and PowerShell. By taking these steps, you can ensure that your servers remain available and running smoothly at all times.