Microsoft Message Analyzer Blog

1/20/2020

2 minutes to read





In this article

All things about Message Analyzer and related diagnosis for Networks Traces, Log files, and Windows Event Tracing (ETW) Components.

Microsoft Message Analyzer – Retirement Notice

Microsoft Message Analyzer (MMA) was retired and its download packages removed from microsoft.com sites on November 25 2019. There is currently no Microsoft replacement for Microsoft Message Analyzer in development at this time. For similar functionality, please consider using a 3rd party network protocol analyzer tool such as Wireshark.

If you already have Microsoft Message Analyzer installed, you may continue to use it, along with the OPN parsers you have already downloaded.

Versions Affected

Versions 1.4 and earlier.

Reason for Deprecation

Microsoft Message Analyzer was last released in October 2016 and has not been under active development since that date. There are no plans for further public releases of Microsoft Message Analyzer.

Impact

If you already have Microsoft Message Analyzer installed, you may continue to use it, along with the OPN parsers you have already downloaded. Parsing ETW traces will also continue to work as before. However, after November 25 2019, no versions of Microsoft Message Analyzer will be made available for public download on Microsoft.com sites and you will no longer be able to download OPN parsers. After November 25 2019 when MMA is launched, it will attempt to connect to the back-end Feed service to check News and Assets updates and an error message will appear. To dismiss this error message, see Dismiss Error Message in the MMA Operations Guide.

Recommendations

If you want to restore OPN parsers in an MMA installation done after November 25 2019, follow the steps in the Backup and Restore OPN Packages topic here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/blog/ms-winintbloglp/6344e692-0783-4f0a-bb97-5a07b9167286.

If you used Microsoft Message Analyzer to convert ETL-format packet capture files to PCAP format, you can get the same functionality from the open source etl2pcapng tool.