Windows Performance Analyzer and System.Diagnostics.Tracing.EventSource (.Net 4.5)

Question

Is it possible to use WPA to analyze .etl files containing custom events created using System.Diagnostics.Tracing.EventSource (.Net 4.5)?

Thanks

Answer 1

I would like to know this as well!

Answer 2

I would like to know this as well!

I have done it with .NET 4.0. It does work when the manifest file for the events can be found by WPA.exe. I have seen some methods on TraceEventSource as well which seem to spit out a manifest file. You need to install it with wevtutil -im youManifestFile to be able to decode the events with xperf or WPA. It could be that .NET 4.5 already registered a geric manifest. You can try it out without this step and see how it does turn out.

Currently there seems to be a limitation of WPA that it cannot decode custom events when you did only start a user mode collector. You can view your traces with xperf but not with WPA. But if you start a kernel session with at least PROC_THREAD enabled and your own trace provider you can view them in WPA as well. They will show up as Custom Events for wich you can filter.

Unfortunatley WPA does not support content based filtering which would be for custom traces a big plus. There is a nice GUI available from SvcPerf which allows also to view your traces and you can filter there also content based.

It is also nice to know that you can set marks with xperf -m MarkText to get a nice overview of relevant time points in your etl file.

Yours,

  Alois Kraus