How to: Use Web Services to Enable and Configure Trace for Team Foundation Server Components

  • Article

You can use built-in Web services to enable tracing for Team Foundation Server applications. This lets you gather state information about a process without recycling the application pool. You can start collecting information after a problem is detected. This topic describes how to enable tracing for individual Team Foundation Server applications. For general information about Trace, see Tracing and Instrumenting Applications.

You can only use the Web service to enable or disable all the built-in Trace switches. To enable or disable individual Trace switches, you must manually modify the Team Foundation Server web.config file as described in How to: Change Configuration Settings for Team Foundation Server Components.

Note

When trace is enabled using this method, the trace settings do not persist when the application pool is restarted. For persistent changes to the Trace status, you much change the web.config file as described in How to: Change Configuration Settings for Team Foundation Server Components.

Required Permissions

To perform this procedure, you must be a member of the Administrators group on the Team Foundation application-tier server. For more information, see Team Foundation Server Permissions.

To enable Trace for Team Foundation Server Applications

  • In Internet Explorer, locate the following URL:

    http://<tfsserver>:<port>/<WebService>/tftrace.aspx?[traceWriter=<true|false>][&][All=<traceLevel>]

    Note

    Even if you are logged on with administrative credentials, you must start Internet Explorer as an administrator to perform this function on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista. To start Internet Explorer as an administrator, click Start, click All Programs, right-click Internet Explorer, and then click Run as administrator. For more information, see the Microsoft Web site.

    In this syntax, <tfsserver> represents the name of the Team Foundation Server. <Port> represents the port, usually 8080. <WebService> represents the name of the Team Foundation Server application for which you want to enable tracing. The traceWriter and All arguments are optional. See later text for examples and valid values for the <WebService> and <traceLevel> arguments.

    Valid values for <WebService> are Build, services, VersionControl, Warehouse, and WorkItemTracking. Valid values for the All argument are None, Errors, Warnings, Information, and Verbose.

    This example sets all the VersionControl trace switches to Verbose and does not affect the traceWriter value:

    http://<tfsserver>:8080/VersionControl/tftrace.aspx?All=Verbose

    This example sets all the Warehouse trace switches to Error and the traceWriter value to true:

    http://<tfsserver>:8080/Warehouse/tftrace.aspx?traceWriter=true&All=Error

    Note

    You will see a blank Web page when you enable or change trace levels.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Change the Trace Output Directory for Team Foundation Server Components

How to: Change Configuration Settings for Team Foundation Server Components

Other Resources

Enabling Trace for Team Foundation Server Components