TraceView Overview

TraceView was designed to replace the many traditional, single-function command-line tracing tools with one tool that performs all of the functions of a trace controller and a trace consumer in a convenient graphic user interface.

With TraceView, you can start a trace session and display trace messages from real-time trace sessions and trace logs immediately, without a separate formatting step. It can extract all of the information that it needs about the provider, including control GUIDs and trace message formatting data, from the provider's PDB symbol file, eliminating several steps.

The TraceView window is easy to use and frees you from looking up or remembering the command-line parameters.

TraceView displays trace messages in a trace message list window, so you can view, filter, and sort the trace messages easily. And, you can copy the trace messages directly from the window and paste them into a text file, spreadsheet file, or database file for saving or later processing.

For more information about TraceView features, see Using TraceView.

This section includes:

TraceView Concepts

TraceView Limitations