Have a problem opening a .TRC file? We collect information about file formats and can explain what TRC files are. Additionally we recommend software suitable for opening or converting such files.
What is the .TRC file type?
Import, view, and analyze LabNotebook files Load saved.trc or WaveML waveform files for offline analysis Analyze oscilloscope traces using x and y cursors and 21 built-in measurements. Jul 11, 2020 OTDR Trace Viewer III (OTDRTraceViewer.exe). Fiberizer Desktop allows post-processing of saved results from fiber optics measurements. In this regard, the program supports opening various types of files, including SOR files (for OTDR traces), JPG (for fiberscope measurement results) and OXLTS (for optical loss measurement results).
Most frequently, the .trc filename extension is used as a short for 'Trace,' and in that meaning it is primarily associated with the Wireshark Packet Trace (TRC) file type and format. Wireshark is a powerful GPL-licensed cross-platform network analysis tool. A de facto industry standard, Wireshark is designed for in-depth inspection of TCP/IP computer networks on a transport-protocol level.
A packet trace file (.trc) is a binary dump of a sequence of network packets captured with Wireshark or any other compatible network sniffer. A TRC file can contain an arbitrary number of packets, depending on capture duration. One .trc file corresponds to one packet capture session.
TRC files can be opened in Wireshark and similar tools for inspection of individual network packets and their contents, requiring a good working knowledge of the TCP/IP network protocol stack.
Differently, but in the same 'Trace' meaning, the .trc extension is also used to denote generic trace files that are created by various applications as part of their debugging mechanism. For instance, .trc files are created and used by major relational database management systems (RDBMS) like Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle SQL*Net, etc.
A generic .trc trace file is simply a verbose dump of all database operations, function calls, application-level events, etc. written to a file on the disk. Such TRC files are used to analyze software behavior in an effort to locate ('trace') and eliminate bugs. TRC files tend to become very large and accumulate, taking up too much disk space and causing performance and stability issues. If no debugging actions are planned, TRC files are safe to delete.
Alternatively, the .trc extension is also used by OpenSim, an open-source motion modeling and capturing application. The extension serves to denote the Track Row Column (TRC) file type and format. TRC files are plaintext and store table-form data. OpenSim uses TRC files to store dimensional position data for markers to model, track and capture motion of humans, robots, etc.
Besides, the .trc extension is used by The New York Times Reader, a multi-platform (Windows/Mac/Linux) application to read electronic issues of The New York Times newspaper, as a label for its annotated article files.
Software to open or convert TRC filesYou can open TRC files with the following programs:
Wireshark by The Wireshark developer community, https://www.wireshark.org
Wireshark by The Wireshark developer community, http://www.wireshark.org
Microsoft SQL Server by Microsoft Corporation
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Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Service Trace Viewer Tool helps you analyze diagnostic traces that are generated by WCF. Service Trace Viewer provides a way to easily merge, view, and filter trace messages in the log so that you can diagnose, repair, and verify WCF service issues.
Configuring Tracing
Diagnostic traces provide you with information that shows what is happening throughout your application's operation. As the name implies, you can follow operations from their source to destination and through intermediate points as well.
You can configure tracing using the application’s configuration file—either Web.config for Web-hosted applications, or Appname.config for self-hosted applications. The following is an example:
In this example, the name and type of the trace listener is specified. The Listener is named
sdt and the standard .NET Framework trace listener (System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener) is added as the type. The initializeData attribute is used to set the name of the log file for that Listener to be SdrConfigExample.e2e . For the log file, you can substitute a fully-qualified path for a simple file name.
The example creates a file in the root directory called SdrConfigExample.e2e. When you use the Trace Viewer to open the file as described in the 'Opening and Viewing WCF Trace Files' section, you can see all the messages that have been sent.
The tracing level is controlled by the
switchValue setting. The available tracing levels are described in the following table.
You can use
add to specify the name and type of the trace listener you want to use. In the example configuration, the Listener is named sdt and the standard .NET Framework trace listener (System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener ) is added as the type. Use initializeData to set the name of the log file for that Listener. In addition, you can substitute a fully-qualified path for a simple file name.
Starting in .NET Framework 4.8, ComboBox controls in some high contrast themes are displayed in the correct color. You can disable this change by removing the following setting from the svcTraceViewer.exe.config file:
Using the Service Trace Viewer ToolOpening and Viewing WCF Trace Files
The Service Trace Viewer supports three file types:
Service Trace Viewer enables you to open any supported trace file, add and integrate additional trace files, or open and merge a group of trace files simultaneously.
To open a trace file
Note
The Service Trace Viewer tool can associate with two file types: .svclog and .stvproj. You can use two parameters in command line to register and unregister the file extensions.
/register: register the association of file extensions '.svclog' and '.stvproj' with SvcTraceViewer.exe
/unregister: unregister the association of file extensions '.svclog' and '.stvproj' with SvcTraceViewer.exe
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Caution
It is not recommended that you load a trace log file bigger than 200MB. If you attempt to load a file larger than this limit, the loading process may take a long time, depending on your computer resource. The Service Trace Viewer tool may not be responsive for a long time, or it may exhaust your machine's memory. It is recommended that you configure partial loading to avoid this. For more information on how to do this, see 'Loading Large Trace Files' section.
Event Tracing and Crimson Tracing
The viewer’s native format is the activity tracing format that WCF emits. Traces emitted in a different format must be converted before the viewer displays them. Currently, in addition to the activity tracing format, the viewer supports event tracing and crimson tracing.
When you open a file that does not contain activity traces, the viewer attempts to convert the file. You must specify the name and location of the file that will contain the converted trace data. Once the data has been converted, the viewer displays the content of the new file.
Note
Conversion requires disk space to store the converted trace data. Make sure you have enough disk space available to store the data before you start a conversion. Otherwise, the conversion fails.
Managing Projects
The viewer supports projects to facilitate viewing multiple trace files. For example, if you have a client trace file and a service trace file, you can add them to a project. Then, every time you open the project, all the trace files in the project are loaded simultaneously.
There are two ways to manage projects:
Viewing WCF Traces
WCF emits traces using the activity tracing format. In the activity tracing model, individual traces are grouped in activities according to their purpose. Logical control flow is transferred between activities. For example, during the lifetime of an application, many 'message send activities' appear and disappear. For more information on viewing traces and activities, and the user interface of the Service Trace Viewer too, see Using Service Trace Viewer for Viewing Correlated Traces and Troubleshooting.
Switching to Different Views
The Service Trace Viewer provides the following different views. They are displayed as tabs on the left pane of the Viewer, and can also be accessed from the View menu.
Activity view
Once the trace files are opened, you can see the traces grouped into activities and displayed in the Activity view in the left-hand pane.
The Activity view displays activity names, number of traces in the activity, duration time, start time and end time.
By clicking any of the listed activities, the traces in this activity are displayed in the trace pane on the right. You can then select a trace to view its details.
You can select multiple activities by pressing the Ctrl or Shift key and clicking the desired activities. The trace pane displays all the traces of the selected activities.
You can double-click an activity to display it in Graph View. The alternative way is to select an activity and switch to Graph View.
Note
The activity '000000000000' is a special activity that cannot be displayed in the Graph View. Because all other activities are linked to it, displaying this activity has a severe performance impact.
You can click the column title to sort the activity list. Activities that contain warning traces have a yellow background and those that contain error traces have a red one.
There are different types of activities and each type corresponds to an icon on the left side of each activity. You can refer to the Understanding Trace Icons section for their meaning.
Project View
This view enables you to manage trace files in the current project. See the Managing Project section for more details.
Message View
This view enables you to view all message log traces, including Action, Date/Time, Process, Acivity and From/To, and navigate to the details of the associated message log trace. You can group the message log traces by Activity Boundary, Process/Thread, or Send & Receive for easier navigation of the message flow.
Graph View
This view displays the trace data for a given activity in chart form. The chart form enables you to see the stepwise execution of events and the interrelationships between multiple activities as data moves between them.
To switch to Graph view, select an activity in the Activity view and click the Activity tab, or a message log trace in the Message View. If multiple trace files are loaded and the activity involves traces from more than one file, all of the relevant traces appear in the graph view. Double-clicking on the activities and message log traces also leads you to the Graph view.
In Graph view, each vertical column represents an activity, and each block in the column represents a trace. The activities are grouped by process (or thread). The small arrows between activities represent transfers. The big arrows between processes represent message exchange. The activity in selection is always in yellow.
Selecting Traces in the Graph
Expanding or Collapsing Activity Transfers
You can expand activity transfers when the activity in selection transfers out to another activity. It enables you to follow the transfers.
To expand or collapse activity transfers,
Note
When an activity has multiple transfers into it and you expand one of the transfers, activities that lead up to the new activity from the root activity are displayed. These new activities appear in collapsed form. If you want to see the details of these activities, expand them vertically by clicking the expand icon in the header of the graph.
Expanding or Collapsing Activities Vertically
The viewer hides unnecessary detail in the activity graph by collapsing activities. In a collapsed activity, individual traces are not displayed. Only transfers trace appear. If you want to view all traces in an activity, expand the activity vertically by clicking the expand symbol of the activity in the header of the graph.
To expand or collapse activities vertically,
Options
You can select two options from the Option menu in Graph view.
Layout Mode
The viewer has two Layout Modes: Process and Thread. This setting defines the largest unit of organization. The default Layout Mode is Process, which means that activities are grouped by processes in the graph.
Execution List
You can select which process or thread to be displayed in the graph from this drop-down list. For example, if you have the trace files of two clients (A and B) and one service opened, and you only want to display the service and client A in the graph, you can deselect client B from the list.
Viewing Trace Details
To view a trace detail, select a trace in the Trace pane. The details are displayed in the Detail pane.
Trace Pane
The upper right pane in the Service Trace Viewer is the Trace Pane. It lists all the traces in the selected activity with extra information, for example, trace level, thread ID, and process name.
You can copy the raw XML of the trace to the clipboard by right-clicking a trace and selecting Copy Trace to Clipboard.
Detail Pane
The bottom left pane in the Service Trace Viewer is the Detail Pane. It provides three tabs to view trace details.
The Formatted view displays the information in a more organized way. It lists all known XML elements in tables and trees, making it easier to read and understand the information.
The XML view displays XML corresponding to the selected trace. It supports highlighting and syntax color. When you use Find to search strings, it highlights the search results.
The Message view displays the message part of the XML in message log traces. It is invisible when you select a non-message trace.
Filtering WCF Traces
To make the analysis of trace easier, you can filter them in the following ways:
Only traces that passes through all filters is displayed.
Using the Filter Toolbar
The filter toolbar appears across the top of the tool. If it is not present, you can activate it in the View menu. The bar has three components:
The Filter Now button starts the filter operation. Some filters, especially when they are applied to a large data set, take a long time to complete. You can cancel the filter operation by pressing the Stop button that appears in the status bar under the Operations menu.
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The Clear button resets pre-defined and custom filters to allow all traces to pass through.
Filter Options
The viewer can automatically remove WCF traces from the view. It can selectively remove traces emitted by specific areas of WCF, for example, removing transaction related traces from the view.
The settings of this filter are defined in the Filter Options sub-menu under View menu.
Custom Filters
If you are familiar with the XML Path Language (XPath), you can use it to construct custom filters to search the trace data for any XML element of interest. The filters are accessible through the filter toolbar.
Custom filters can include parameters. You can also import pre-existing custom filters.
Creating a custom filter
Filters can be created in two ways:
Creating a Custom Filter using the Template Wizard
You can click an existing trace and create a filter based on the structure of the trace. This example creates a custom filter based on thread ID.
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Note
Once a filter has been created using the template wizard, it can only be edited manually. It is not possible to activate the wizard for a filter that has been created previously. In addition, the conditions of an XPath filter created in the template wizard are combined using the OR operator. If you require an AND operation, you can edit the filter expression after it has been created.
Creating a Custom Filter Manually
The Custom Filters menu allows you to enter XPath filters manually.
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Applying a Custom Filter
Once a custom filter has been created, it is accessible though the filter toolbar. Select the filter you want to apply in the Search In field of the filter toolbar. For the previous example, select ‘Thread ID’.
If your filter uses multiple parameters, enter them using ‘;’ as a separator in the Find What field. For example, the following string defines 3 parameters: ‘1;findValue;text’. The viewer applies ‘1’ to the {0} parameter of the filter. ‘findValue’ and ‘text’ are applied to {1} and {2} respectively.
Sharing custom Filters
Custom filters can be shared between different sessions and different users. You can export the filters to a definition file and import this file at another location.
To import a custom filter:
To export a custom filter:
Note
These custom filters can only be imported and exported from Service Trace Viewer. They cannot be read by other tools.
Finding Data
The viewer provides the following ways to find data:
The find toolbar appears at the top of the viewer. If it is not present, you can activate it in the View menu. The bar has two components:
The find dialog provides two additional options:
Navigating Traces
Because traces are recorded step by step during application runtime, navigating traces can help you to debug your application. The Service Trace Viewer provides various ways to navigate in traces.
Step Forward or Backward
If you consider each trace as a line of code in the program, stepping forward is very similar to 'Step over' in the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The difference is that you can also step backward in the traces. Stepping forward means moving to the next trace in the activity.
Note
This can take you to an activity occurring in a different process or even on a different computer, because WCF messages can carry activity IDs that span machines.
Follow Transfer
Transfer traces are special traces in the trace file. An activity may transfer to another activity by a transfer trace. For example, 'Activity A' may transfer to 'Activity B'. In such case, there is a transfer trace in the 'Activity A' with the name 'To: Activity' and the transfer icon. This transfer trace is a link between the two traces. In 'Activity B', there might also be a transfer trace at the end of the activity to transfer back to 'Activity A'. This is similar to function calls in programs: A calls B, then B returns.
'Follow transfer' is similar to 'Step into' in a debugger. It follows the transfer from A to B. It does not have any effect on other traces.
There are two ways to follow a transfer: by mouse or by keyboard:
Note
In many cases, when Activity A transfers to Activity B, Activity A waits until Activity B transfers back to Activity A. This means that Activity A has no trace logged during the period when Activity B is actively tracing. However, it is also possible that Activity A does not wait, and continues to log traces. It is also possible that Activity B does not transfer back to Activity A. Therefore, activity transfers are still different from function calls in this sense. You can understand activity transfers better in Graph view.
Jump to Next or Previous Transfer
When you are analyzing the current activity, or selected activities when multiple activities are selected, you may want to quickly find the activities it transfers to. 'Jump to next transfer' allows you to locate the next transfer trace in the activity. Once you find the transfer trace, you can use 'Follow transfer' to step into the next activity.
Navigate in Graph View
Although navigating in the activity pane and trace pane is similar to debugging, using Graph view provides a much better experience in navigation. See 'Graph View' section for more information.
Loading Large Trace Files
Trace files can be very large. For example, if you turn on tracing on the 'Verbose' level, the resulting trace file for running a few minutes can easily be hundreds of megabytes or even larger, depending on network speed and communication pattern.
When you open a very large trace file in the Service Trace Viewer, system performance can be negatively impacted. The loading speed and the response time after loading can be slow. Actual speed differs from time to time, depending on your hardware configuration. In most PCs, loading a trace file larger than 200M has a severe performance impact. For traces files larger than 1G, the tool may use up all available memory, or stop responding for a very long time.
In order to avoid the slow loading and response time in analyzing large trace files, the Service Trace Viewer provides a feature called 'Partial Loading', which only loads a small part of the trace at a time. For example, you may have a trace file over 1GB, running for several days on the server. When some errors have occurred and you want to analyze the trace, it is not necessary to open the entire trace file. Instead, you can load the traces within a certain period of time when the error might have occurred. Because the scope is smaller, the Service Trace Viewer tool can load the file faster and you can identify the errors using a smaller set of data.
Enabling Partial Loading
You do not need to manually enable partial loading. If the total size of the trace file(s) you attempt to load exceeds 40MB, Service Trace Viewer automatically displays a Partial Loading dialog for you to select the part that you want to load.
Note
Because traces may not be distributed evenly in the time span, the length of the time period you specify in the Partial Loading toolbar may not be proportional to the loading size shown. The actual loading size can be smaller than the Estimated Size in the partial loading dialog.
Adjusting Partial Loading
After you have partially loaded the trace file, you may want to change the data set being loaded. You can do so by adjusting the Partial Loading toolbar at the top of the viewer.
Understanding Trace Icons
The following is a list of icons that the Service Trace Viewer tool uses in the Activity view, Graph view and Trace pane to represent different items.
Note
Some traces that are not categorized (for example, 'a message is closed') have no icon.
Activity Tracing Traces
WCF Traces
Trc File Viewer DownloadActivitiesSor File Viewer
WCF Activities
Troubleshooting
If you do not have permission to write to the registry, you get the following error message 'The Microsoft Service Trace Viewer was not registered to the system' when you use the '
svctraceviewer /register ' command to register the tool. If this occurs, you should log in using an account that has write access to the registry.
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In addition, the Service Trace Viewer tool writes some settings (for example, custom filters and filter options) to the SvcTraceViewer.exe.settings file in its assembly folder. If you do not have read permission for the file, you can still launch the tool, but you cannot load the settings.
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If you get the error message 'An unknown error occurred while processing one or more traces' when opening the .etl file, it means that the format of the .etl file is invalid.
If you open a trace log created using an Arabic operating system, you may notice that the time filter does not work. For example, year 2005 corresponds to year 1427 in Arabic calendar. However, the time range supported by the Service Trace Viewer tool filter does not support a date earlier than 1752. This can imply that you are not able to select a correct date in the filter. To resolve this problem, you can create a custom filter (View/Custom Filters) using an XPath expression to include a specific time range.
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