Analyse crash dumps programmatically

Question

Is there any api's which load a crash dump, symbols from the symbol store and then allow programmatic access to the information?

I want to create a tool to auto process crash dumps and produce a report based on them.

Answer 1

Debug diagnostic tool has a com interface that can load a dump, process it using symbols and give you the information back.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=26798

Tutorial: http://codenasarre.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/how-to-control-a-debugger-engine/

Answer 2

Use a command file for Windbg which sets up your configs and then runs !analyze. Set windbg to output to a file (as described here: windbg: Command output to text file)

Then you can enjoy trying to sort, categorize, etc. the output from that. !analyzewill do a decent job of analyzing most crashes. If it can't, I doubt you'd be doing a better job with your own code, unless you have a lot of experience in analyzing crash logs by program (I haven't ever tried, although I have a decent idea of what to look for, I wouldn't necessarily want to write code to actually do it - I have written code to write logs when the system has crashed, so I know what you usually need).

Answer 3

The Windows dbghelp API loads symbols and line number information to support making stack back traces. Do not know API for reading crash dump files.