Summary

Tracing can provide detailed information about application flow as well as performance.

You can set up tracing by registering the AdoNetDiag.dll component. You can use the LogMan.exe command-line utility to create, control, and modify trace collections. The Performance Logs And Alerts snap-in provides a graphical means for creating and controlling traces.

The output of a trace is an .etl file, which is a binary file that can be converted to a .csv file by running the TraceRpt.exe command-line utility. The output of the TraceRpt.exe utility is a file called summary.txt and a file called dumptrace.csv. The summary.txt file contains event counts, and the dumptrace.csv file contains detailed information that can be consumed by third-party applications, such as the LogParser.exe utility that is included with the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit.

You can use tracing to diagnose problems by starting the trace, running the application until it breaks, stopping the trace, and running reports or tools to filter the data.