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Enabling and Viewing WDTF Traces

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WDTF Tracing refers to reporting events that occur internally within WDTF objects. Because WDTF is heavily instrumented, all WDTF objects provide tracing information as they run. WDTF handles tracing by using WPP Software Tracing. This type of tracing is a standardized format that you can read by using WDK tools, including TraceView. This topic covers how to use Logman and Tracefmt to view WDTF run-time traces. This topic also discusses how you can programmatically configure WDTF trace levels.

How to collect and save WDTF Traces

To start collecting WDTF traces

  1. On the test computer, open a Command Prompt window with elevated privileges (Run as administrator) and enter the following commands:

    logman.exe create trace "autosession\WDTF" -p {6210f559-c7f7-4d2f-b674-4bc9315cecc7} 0xffffffff 0xff -o c:\WDTF_Traces\TraceFile.etl
reg add HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WMI\Autologger\WDTF /v LogFileMode /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
reg add HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WMI\Autologger\WDTF /v FileMax /t REG_DWORD /d 16 /f
reg add HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WMI\Autologger\WDTF /v MaxFileSize /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

  2. Reboot the computer.

See Logman (Logman.exe) for information about other options. For information about creating a trace season, see Configuring and Starting an AutoLogger Session.

To stop collecting WDTF traces and save log files

  1. You can stop collecting WDTF traces and delete the data collector with the following commands:

    logman.exe -stop -ets WDTF
logman.exe delete "autosession\WDTF"

  2. Reboot the computer.

  3. Copy the log files from the test computer to another computer for later analysis.

    The ETL log files collected can be very large in size. For best results, copy the log files from the test computer (for example, c:\WDTF_Traces\TraceFile.etl) to another computer. Then you can delete the log files from the test computer.

How to view WDTF traces

Viewing WDTF traces requires formatting the ETL files. The following steps show how to use Tracefmt.exe to convert the ETL files to text or CSV files.

To view WDTF Traces

  1. For example, the following command converts the ETL file that has been saved as c:\WDTF_Traces\TraceFile.etl to text.

    Tracefmt.exe –r http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols c:\WDTF_Traces\TraceFile.etl -o OutputTxtFile.txt

  2. The following command converts the ETL file that has been saved as c:\WDTF_Traces\TraceFile.etl to comma separated file (CSV).

    Tracefmt.exe –r http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols c:\WDTF_Traces\TraceFile.etl -csv –o OutputCsvFile.csv

  3. Open the CSV files in Microsoft Excel so you can use filtering features of Excel to filter the collected traces. You can filter the traces for certain time periods. You can filter the traces to examine traces logged by certain WDTF components.

Programmatically configuring WDTF trace levels

All WDTF objects provide tracing information as they run.

WDTF provides a set of configurable TTraceLevel levels. For information on how to set the TTraceLevel of a specific object instance at run-time, see the ITracing::SetTraceLevel method.

For information on how to set the default TTraceLevel for an interface, see the Windows Device Testing Framework Reference.

For a detailed description of the types of traces included in each TTraceLevel, see the ITracer interface. You can globally configure these levels yourself using the ITracer's registry TraceLevel Path.

The following table describes the trace levels that you can set.

Level Description
0 Off. No tracing is provided.
1 Low
2 Medium. This level is the default level of tracing.
3 High
4 Full. All tracing information is reported.
5-8 Custom levels.
9 Sets the object back to its initial trace level.

When you are debugging by using trace content, consider setting the trace levels to 1 for all objects and then setting trace levels much higher for the objects that you are examining.

For more information about trace levels, see the ITracer interface.

Configuring and Starting an AutoLogger Session
Logman
Tracefmt
TraceView
WPP Software Tracing