[ACCEPTED]-Where do I get tracefmt.exe? And how do I read my MSDTC traces?-msdtc

With Visual Studio 2010 installed, I found 4 the tool in the following location:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin\x64\TraceFmt.exe

I then 3 copied the .EXE to the following location:

C:\Windows\System32\Msdtc\Trace

And 2 ran it as follows:

TraceFmt.exe dtctrace.log.2012-06-13-10-38-57-0601-00

Although most of the time 1 I use msdtcvtr.bat, as follows:

C:\Windows\System32\Msdtc\Trace\msdtcvtr.bat -tracelog dtctrace.log.2012-06-13-10-38-57-0601-00

To save on downloading all of the WDK (600MB+), just 2 for 200KB of files, I opted for a 4.7MB 1 download by doing the following:

1. Download "Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools" from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=49AE8576-9BB9-4126-9761-BA8011FABF38&displaylang=en
2. If running from XP, just extract and go
3. If running from 2003 (like I am), you'll get an error saying this can only be installed on XP. So to get around this, use a tool to extract the exe instead.
4. Inside the exe will be a support.cab, extract the contents of this somewhere
5. Look for these two files, tracefmt.exe and traceprt.dll. Copy these to your %windir%\system32\msdtc\trace directory

tracefmt (and traceview which is easier 4 to use) are available in the Windows Driver 3 Kit (WDK). It is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=11800. It 2 is in the WDK since this tracing technology 1 is more commonly used in device drivers.

DTC Tracing

The Distributed Services Support Team blog 9 goes over how to trace the DTC in more detail.

Windows Driver Kit

The links in the 8 accepted answer seem to be broken. I've 7 found the Windows Driver Kit homepage and current download link.

Once you have the ISO downloaded 6 and you're at the installation screen, Microsoft 5 Windows Driver Kit, select only Tools from 4 Full Development Environment. The tracefmt.exe 3 is in <install-path>\<version>\Tools\tracing\i386. Make sure you copy the version of tracefmt.exe from the 64-bit or 32-bit directory!

The blogger above moved those files 2 to the DTC folder %systemroot%\MsDtc\Trace, probably so they were 1 in the msdtcvtr.bat path.

After searching for tracefmt.exe and traceprt.dll 8 from the above posts (and elsewhere) I found 7 that you need the 64 bit version of the 6 tools for the program to run on Windows 5 Server 2008.

I found this blog post.

and found that if you 4 have visual studio installed you should 3 be able to find both the 64-bit and 32-bit 2 versions for the exe and dll on your local 1 machine:

• ProgramFiles\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\ (32 bit)
• ProgramFiles\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\x64\ (64 bit)

Tracefmt.exe comes with the Windows Driver 1 Kit.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2105564e-1a9a-4bf4-8d74-ec5b52da3d00&displaylang=en

Very often you should use existed *.mof 4 file for enconding trace files. In C:\Windows\System32\Msdtc\Trace\ u 3 can see msdtctr.mof. This file has description 2 of the trace files and u need to use it 1 file like this:

tracefmt log_filename -tmf msdtctr.mof

I found Darren's and Thomas Bratt's answers 4 quite helpful, but in order to successfully 3 parse DTC files using tracefmt, I had to provide 2 the tmf parameter:

tracefmt -tmf msdtctr.mof dtctrace.log

Otherwise every event turned 1 out something like

Unknown( 21): GUID=75f91e0e-d50c-47c9-b06f-3f2013e9da73 (No Format Information found).