How to create an event trace with logman.exe on W2K8

performanceperformance-monitoringwindows-event-logwindows-server-2008

For various reasons, I'd like to get a trace of disk accesses on some Windows Server 2008 machines.

I can set up a user defined data collector set in the Reliability and Performance Monitor tool to create an event trace using the "Windows Kernel Trace" provider ("disk" suboption), and this works fine.

However, I really would like to automate this using the logman.exe command. The documentation on logman is, I'd say, sparse. (If there's some great documentation out there, I'd be very grateful for a pointer!) I've tried using both commands with the -ets option and without, and using both the logman create trace <name> <params>/logman start <name> and the -ets-only logman start <name> <params> -ets method.

Nothing I've tried seems to work:

C:\>mkdir \tracedata

C:\>logman create trace DiskTr1 -p "Windows Kernel Trace" disk -o "C:\tracedata\DiskTr1"
The command completed successfully.

C:\>logman start DiskTr1

Error:
The session name provided is invalid.

C:\>logman start DiskTr2 -p "Windows Kernel Trace" disk -o "C:\tracedata\DiskTr2" -ets

Error:
The session name provided is invalid.

C:\>logman create trace DiskTr3 -p "Windows Kernel Trace" disk -o "C:\tracedata\DiskTr3" -ets

Error:
The session name provided is invalid.

I've also tried variants using the GUID for the provider and a hex value for the disk suboption, and so far nothing seems to work.

Thanks!

Best Answer

The 'Windows Kernel Trace' provider is considered a special provider in ETW, and it will only log to a session called 'NT Kernel Logger'.

See http://www.daschmelzer.com/cmg2006/PDFs/096.pdf

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