Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides application instrumentation and diagnostic data for fault monitoring and analysis. You can use tracing instead of a debugger to understand how an application is behaving, or why it faults. You can also correlate faults and processing across components to provide an end-to-end experience.

WCF outputs the following data for diagnostic tracing:

  • Traces for process milestones across all components of the applications, such as operation calls, code exceptions, warnings and other significant processing events."

  • Windows error events when the tracing feature malfunctions.

In This Section

Configuring Tracing

This topic describes how you can configure tracing at different levels to suit your specific need.

End-to-End Tracing

This section describes how you can use Activity Tracing and Propagation for end-to-end correlation to assist debugging.

Using Tracing to Troubleshoot Your Application

This section describes how you can use tracing to debug your application.

Security Concerns and Useful Tips for Tracing

This topic describes how you can protect sensitive information from being exposed, as well as useful tips when using WebHost.

Traces Reference

This topic lists all the traces generated by WCF.

See also