Using the Consolidated Tracing Facility on Microsoft Azure

The Consolidated Tracing Facility (CTF) is a tracing infrastructure that enables you to quickly and easily produce diagnostic information detailing the operation of your applications. This section describes the Microsoft Azure-specific functionality that is provided by CTF and assumes that you are familiar with the operation of CTF in a non-Microsoft Azure environment. See your Enterprise Developer documentation for information on CTF.

You use CTF on Microsoft Azure in the same way as you use CTF in non-Microsoft Azure environments, with the following additional steps:

  1. Update your CTF configuration file to specify one of the two new Microsoft Azure-specific emitters.
  2. Update the configuration files for your Microsoft Azure roles.
  3. Add references to two tracing-related .dll files.

Once you have performed these additional steps you run your application as normal for CTF to produce the trace information, then you download the trace information (if the application was run on Microsoft Azure rather than locally) and view it.

Note:

A sample program, AzureTracing, is available in the Samples Browser and contains a worker role which creates trace entries on startup.