How to: Collect Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) data

Applies to: yesVisual Studio noVisual Studio for Mac

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) is an efficient kernel-level tracing facility that enables profiler log kernel or application-defined events. The data that is collected from the event provider can be viewed only by using the /Summary:ETW option of the VSPerfReport command-line tool. You can use this report to determine where performance issues occur in the application.

Note

Enhanced security features in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 required significant changes in the way the Visual Studio profiler collects data on these platforms. UWP apps also require new collection techniques. See Performance Tools on Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 applications.

To enable event trace providers

  1. In Performance Explorer, right-click the performance session, and then click Properties.

  2. In the Property Pages, click the Windows Events properties.

  3. In the Select event trace provider to collect data from list, select the event providers that you want to use to profile your application.

See also

Configure performance sessions