BizTalk high performance tracing/logging – CAT, ETW

Every BizTalk developer needs and uses the tracing and logging feature especially development environment. Some circumstances we need to log and trace something in production environment even though this negatively impacts the performance of production environment. Basically System.Diagnostic.Trace in the .NET Framework uses for tracing but it is so primitive and doesn’t give us the flexibility of start and stop trace capability. Additionally  log4net and Enterprise library are flexible and have more features. This great article compares the performance of  tracing components which are System.Diagnostic.Trace, Entireprise library tracing, log4net and Event Tracing for Windows.

ETW has the most performance and it is 25 times greater than Log4net Tracing Component. The performance of System.Diagnostic component is the least one and it shouldn’t be used in production environment if the performance is required.

The BizTalk CAT Instrumentation Framework is a high performance tracing/logging framework for BizTalk that builds upon the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) infrastructure. The BizTalk CAT Instrumentation Framework is available here. The CAT Tracing component can be started or stopped using with BizTalk CAT Instrumentation Framework Controller.

I have developed the POC application for examining features of BizTalk CAT Tracing Component.