Civil 3D doesn’t crash for no reason. It crashes because something specific happened, and CER is how you find out what.
That used to be easy to say. Then the 2025 releases started writing crash reports as binary .pb files, and the report sitting on your disk turned into something you couldn’t open. I built a viewer so I could read them again, and I wrote about how in an earlier post. People asked for it.
So here it is. Shaan’s CER Viewer 1.0 is free, and you can download it today.
Release Shaan’s CER Viewer 1.0 · 2d3d2d/shaans-cer-viewer
One exe, both formats, one crash or a whole office.
What it is
One exe for Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. No installer, no admin rights, no internet connection. Put it anywhere and run it.
It reads both kinds of Autodesk crash report: the XML that products wrote up to the 2024 releases, and the .pb files from 2025 on. For the .pb files it uses Autodesk’s own decoder, which ships with Autodesk CER and installs with your Autodesk products. If Civil 3D or AutoCAD is on the machine, you already have it.
It only reads. It never changes a crash report, never sends anything anywhere, and has no telemetry of its own. A crash tool that phones home would be a strange thing to hand a CAD manager.
One crash at a time
Open a crash folder and the header tells you what you actually want to know first: the application, the exception, the user, the machine, the drawing that was open, and the last command.
Below that are the tabs. System, graphics and session details. Every raw value from the XML and the decoded .pb, searchable. And the last few commands before the crash, which is where the workflow shows up. A lot of crashes don’t happen in something the user typed. They happen while the product reloads references on open, or saves.
The AI Prompt tab builds a prompt for whatever AI assistant you use, with user and computer names stripped out. Copy it, paste it. There’s no API key and no connection to anything. That’s on purpose.
Select a few crashes and the Compare tab lines them up: what they all share, and where they differ. Same module every time? Same driver? Same drawing? That’s usually your answer.
A whole office at once
This is the part I use most.
Point the viewer at a folder holding everyone’s crash reports. The first time, it reads them all, which takes a few minutes on a big collection. A gerbil runs in an exercise wheel while it works. You’ll see. After that it opens in seconds, lists crashes by date, shows what’s new since you last looked, and searches inside every crash by drawing, command, driver or user.
The first read of a big collection takes a few minutes. The gerbil does the running.
Then the reports:
- Top offenders: drawings, modules, users and machines with the most crashes
- Who owns the failing code: Autodesk, Microsoft, a graphics driver, or that add-in everyone forgot was installed
- Hardware and graphics drivers, including hybrid-graphics laptops
- Product versions and rollouts
- Machine health: the machines that crash every week
- Updates and drivers: machines behind the newest update or driver
- Commands and workflows: what people were doing when it crashed
- Before and after a change
That last one is my favorite. When someone tells me a driver update fixed it, I want to see the crash rate either side of the date. Now I can.
Every report double-clicks into the crashes behind it, and exports to Markdown or CSV. There’s also a one-page HTML dashboard for the people who will never open the viewer, and an Autodesk support pack: one zip with the crash folder, the decoded .pb and a summary, ready to attach to a case.
[IMAGE: The Reports view with bars behind the crash counts]
Every row opens the crashes behind it.
And you can leave a note on a crash pattern (“fixed by driver 32.0.15.8195”, “Autodesk case 12345”) and tick it handled. It shows on every crash with that failure, so nobody investigates the same one twice.
Screen sharing without names
Two switches on the toolbar. Anonymize exports is on by default: anything you export or paste into an AI leaves out user names, emails and computer names. Hide names shows users and computers as codes on screen, for when you’re presenting crash data to a room.
The command line
Everything the window does for a collection, a script can do too. The one I’d start with collects reports from every PC into one shared folder. Put it in a logon script:
ShaansCERViewer.exe --collect \\server\CER
Then, on a schedule if you like:
ShaansCERViewer.exe --index \\server\CERShaansCERViewer.exe --report offenders --root \\server\CER --out offenders.csv --anonymizeShaansCERViewer.exe --dashboard \\server\CER --out crash-dashboard.html --anonymizeShaansCERViewer.exe --support-pack "C:\CER\user\crash-folder" --out autodesk-case.zip
The README in the download lists the rest, including a Markdown batch export and a side-by-side compare.
Bring your own analysis
The Analysis tab shows a root-cause analysis written after the crash, by you or by a local or cloud AI model you run over your reports. The viewer doesn’t write them. It reads any text file in the crash folder that follows a simple format, shows it, and puts its confidence grade and fault owner on the crash as a badge. The format is in the download, with an instruction you can paste into your model so the answer comes back ready to drop in.
What it doesn’t do
It doesn’t read memory dumps (.dmp). It needs Autodesk CER installed to decode .pb files. And it isn’t from Autodesk. It’s my own project, and Autodesk doesn’t support or endorse it.
The exe isn’t code-signed yet, so the first time you run it Windows may say it protected your PC. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
Source code
It’s coming. I want it cleaned up and documented properly before it goes out, and that’s close. When it’s published I’ll post about it here.
FAQ
Is it free? Yes. Free to use, provided as-is with no warranty.
Do I need Autodesk software installed? Only to read .pb crash reports, which need Autodesk CER. XML reports open without it.
Does it send my crash data anywhere? No. It makes no network connections.
Which products does it work with? Any Autodesk desktop product that writes CER reports. I’ve used it most with Civil 3D and AutoCAD.
Where are the crash reports on my PC? In %LOCALAPPDATA%\Autodesk\CER. Paste that into the Explorer address bar and open the whole folder in the viewer.
Will the source code be published? Yes, in the near future.
Tell me what you find, what breaks, and what you want next. Comment here or email me at shaan@shaanhurley.com.
Find the reason behind the crash. Don’t guess. Investigate.
Cheers,
Shaan
