Collecting information for Technical Support

After you notify Technical Support specialists of a problem, they may ask you to create a report that contains information about your operating system and send it to Technical Support. Technical Support specialists may also ask you to create a trace file. The trace file allows tracing the process of performing application commands step by step and determining the stage of application operation at which an error occurs.

To provide better support on issues related to functioning of the application, Technical Support specialists may ask you to temporarily change application settings for debugging purposes while diagnostics are ongoing. To do so, you may need to perform the following actions:

• Collect extended diagnostic information
• Configure individual components of the application by changing special settings that are not accessible through the standard user interface.
• Reconfigure storage and sending of collected diagnostic information
• Set up interception of network traffic and saving of network traffic to a file

Technical Support specialists will give you all information necessary for performing these actions (step-by-step instructions, settings to be changed, scripts, additional command line features, debugging modules, special utilities, etc.) and will inform you of what data will be collected for debugging purposes. After the extended diagnostic information is collected, it is saved on the user's computer. The collected data is not sent automatically to Kaspersky.

You are advised to perform the preceding actions only under the guidance of a Technical Support specialist after receiving instructions to do so. Changing application settings by yourself in ways not described in Help or not recommended by Technical Support specialists can cause slowdowns and crashes of the operating system, reduce the protection level of your computer, and damage the availability and integrity of the processed information.

About the contents and storage of service data files

Trace files and dump files are stored on the computer in non-encrypted form for a period of seven days after data logging is disabled. Trace files and dump files are deleted permanently after seven days.

Trace files are stored in the ProgramData\Kaspersky Lab folder.

The format of trace file names is as follows: KAV<version number_dateXX.XX_timeXX.XX_pidXXX.><trace file type>.log.

Trace files can contain confidential data. You can view the contents of a trace file by opening it in a text editor (such as Notepad).

Performance trace files can be viewed using the Windows Performance Analyzer utility. You can download this utility from the Microsoft website.

How to enable tracing

Make sure that you configure tracing only under the guidance of a Kaspersky Technical Support expert.

To enable application tracing and performance tracing:

1. Open the main application window.
2. Click the button in the lower part of the window.

   The Support window opens.

3. Click the Support Tools link to open the Support Tools window.
4. Enable and configure application traces and performance traces according to the instructions of a Kaspersky Technical Support expert.
5. To save the changes, click the Save button.