Tracing with Menu Tool

Tracing and logging are useful ways to monitor the system. They can help diagnose both errors and performance problems.

To set the tracing options, click the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the SQL link. You can configure the following SQL tracing areas:

·         Multiple SQL statements

·         Long queries

·         Warnings

·         Deadlocks

Microsoft Dynamics AX tracing tools monitor or diagnose the state of the system.

Tracing tools are provided for development and testing, and to monitor client/server traffic in production environments.

To enable tracing for development:

·         Click Tools > Options, and then click the SQL tab. A check box on the top of the tab makes it easy to enable or disable a complete set of trace settings. After this box is selected, all other options on the form are made available.

Four different kinds of traces can be set up: Multiple SQL statements, Long queries, Warnings, and Deadlocks.

The Long queries trace is not enabled until a positive value is entered in the Threshold field. The unit of measure is milliseconds.

Traces can be directed to four output media:

·         Message window: Used for quick and instant display. This is typically used for simple tracing during development.

·         Infolog: Enables information to be accumulated and provides an interface to the SQL Diagnostics tools.

·         Table (database): Used to store large amounts of trace information. If you select this option, trace data is written to the SysTraceTableSQL table, and can be viewed in the SQL statement trace log form.

·         Write to file: Used to store large amounts of trace information.

The tracing system in Microsoft Dynamics AX is based on the kernel supplying information to application elements, which in turn handle dispatching and storing the information. Business partners can extend or change the behavior of the trace-engine. To investigate how to extend the default trace mechanism, check the method SysTrace on the Application class, which is called once for each trace event.