Ze’Diag is a free diagnostic tool from ZestineTech that explains why Revit crashed or misbehaved. Revit records every action, add-in call, and error in a session in a plain-text journal file. These files run to thousands of lines and are hard to read by hand. With Ze’Diag, you upload a journal and get back a structured, readable report. The report covers whether Revit crashed, the likely root cause, the errors and warnings raised, links that failed to load, where time was lost, and which add-ins may have been involved. It also links to known Autodesk solutions where they apply. The report can be downloaded as a PDF to share with the team. ZestineTech's pitch is to diagnose crashes "in minutes, not hours."
Note on sources and scope: Ze’Diag isn’t installed inside Revit. It’s a web application you open in a browser, and it’s listed on the Autodesk App Store as a "web-based Autodesk Revit journal analyzer." Some directories group it under Revit add-ins and scripts because it’s part of the Revit tool ecosystem. This summary is based on ZestineTech’s product page, the Ze’Diag web app’s own pages, the Autodesk App Store listing, ZestineTech’s LinkedIn posts, a third-party directory entry, and Autodesk’s documentation on journal files. I found no independent reviews or hands-on tests. Performance claims, such as the speed of the analysis and the crash statistics on the product page, come from ZestineTech.
The Problem It Addresses: Reading Revit Journals
Autodesk's documentation explains what journals are and why they matter, and it shows why a tool like Ze’Diag has a place:
- Revit writes a journal every session: A new journal file (for example Journal.0001.txt) is created each time Revit starts, and the highest number is the most recent. Journals record activity from startup to shutdown. They're normally stored under the user's local AppData folder, in Autodesk\Revit\Autodesk Revit [version]\Journals, which is hidden by default in Windows.
- They hold the answers but are hard to read: Autodesk describes journals as useful for troubleshooting both on the affected machine and remotely. Reading them takes practice, because you have to know what to search for, such as exceptions, fatal errors, add-in entries, and the last successful command before a failure. ZestineTech notes that most BIM users aren't trained to do this.
- Other files travel with them: The journals folder can also hold dump files (.dmp) created when the program crashes, plus worker logs and abbreviated journals. Autodesk tells users to send a dump file to Product Support along with the journal.
- Crash investigations are manual: Common practice is to open the journal in a text editor, search for keywords, find the last successful command and the first error, and isolate suspect add-ins. Autodesk also offers a Notepad++-based search method for documented issues.
Ze’Diag automates that first-pass reading and presents the result in a consistent report format.















