What log viewer tools can read the XML created by System.Diagnostics.EventSchemaTraceListener?

Question

I am in the process of converting our logging implementation to use System.Diagnostics.TraceSource. We want to take advantage of activity tracing and we want to read multiple log files from multiple servers with tools like WCF’s SvcTraceViewer & LogParser.

I have converted our code to use TraceSource and now I am in the process of evaluating performance of trace listeners. Ultimately, we want to take advantage of ETW (etw), but it will be a few months before we move to Windows Server 2008, so we cannot use EventProviderTraceListener yet.

From the documentation, it is clear that EventSchemaTraceListener is the best performing trace listener that produces text file output. Previously, I had been using XmlWriterTraceListener and I was able to open up the logs created by it with SvcTraceViewer. Unfortunately, EventSchemaTraceListener outputs different XML, and although SvcTraceViewer does open and convert the file, it doesn’t do a great job and important fields are lost (like the text of the log message).

Is there a tool other than EventViewer on Vista & Windows 7 for reading the log files created by EventSchemaTraceListener? I was hoping to use SvcTraceViewer because it does a nice job of filtering and following activity transfers.

I could write an XSLT transform to convert the XML to the format expected by SvcTraceViewer. If that is the only way to do this, I will probably do that, but I was hoping that there was already a tool to read the newer format output by EventSchemaTraceListener.

Answer 1

I think what you want is TraceView. It's available as part of the DDK. (Not sure why it's not just part of the Platform SDK.)

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but the schema for the output XML file is called event.xsd. You can get it by downloading the Platform SDK.