Reporting Services Trace Logs

Trace logs contain highly detailed information about report server operations. Trace logs include redundant information that is recorded in other log files, plus additional information that is not otherwise available. Trace logs are useful if you are debugging an application that includes a report server, or investigating a specific problem that was written to the event log or execution log.

Trace logs are created daily, starting with the first entry that occurs after midnight (local time). The trace log file name is derived from the local time of the computer. By default, trace logs are limited to 32 megabytes and deleted after 14 days.

Finding Trace Logs

SQL Server Reporting Services provides four trace log files, which are located at \Microsoft SQL Server\<SQL Server Instance>\Reporting Services\LogFiles. They are described in the following table.

Viewing Log Information

Trace logs are text files. You can use any text editor to view a log. The following information can be found in a trace log:

• System information, including operating system, version, number of processors, and memory.
• Reporting Services component and version information.
• Events logged the Application log.
• Exceptions generated by the report server.
• Low resource warnings logged by a report server.
• Inbound SOAP envelopes and summarized outbound SOAP envelopes.
• HTTP header, stack trace, and debug trace information.

You can review trace logs to determine whether a report delivery occurred, who received the report, and how many delivery attempts were made. Trace logs also record report execution activity and the environment variables that are in effect during report processing. Errors and exceptions are also entered into trace logs. For example, you may find report timeout errors (indicated as a ThreadAbortExceptions entry).

Setting Tracing Levels

Tracing levels are specified through DefaultTraceSwitch and RSTrace settings. Each component stores tracing level settings in different configuration files. To control how much information is recorded to each log file, you must modify the settings in the appropriate configuration file.

RStrace Settings

The following example illustrates the XML structure of the RStrace settings. The value for DefaultTraceSwitch determines the kind of information that is added to the log. Except for the Components attribute, the values for RStrace are the same across the configuration files. The Components attribute has a different set of valid values for the Report Server Web.config file. The table in this section explains the valid values for that attribute.

  <system.diagnostics>
        <switches>
            <add name="DefaultTraceSwitch" value="3" />
        </switches>
  </system.diagnostics>
  <RStrace>
        <add name="FileName" value="ReportServerService_" />
        <add name="FileSizeLimitMb" value="32" />
        <add name="KeepFilesForDays" value="14" />
        <add name="Prefix" value="tid, time" />
        <add name="TraceListeners" value="debugwindow, file" />
        <add name="TraceFileMode" value="unique" />
        <add name="Components" value="all" />
  </RStrace>

The following table provides information about each setting.

Adding Custom Configuration Setting to Specify a Dump File Location

You can add a custom setting to set the location that the Dr. Watson for Windows tool uses to store dump files. The custom setting is Directory. The following example provides an illustration of how this configuration setting is specified in the RStrace section:

<add name="Directory" value="U:\logs\" />

For more information, see Knowledge Base Article 913046 on the Microsoft Web site.

See Also

Concepts

Reporting Services Log Files

Other Resources

Reporting Services Errors and Events
Troubleshooting Reporting Services

Help and Information

Getting SQL Server 2005 Assistance