Tip #351: Tracing for plugins and custom workflow activities

CRM Online continues to improve on the existing features, as Andre “I’ve got 88 in my handle” Margono noticed when looking at the tracing functionality. ITracingService was available to the savvy developers since CRM 2011, however, the catch always has been that trace is only available when things go wrong, exception kind of wrong. Enter CRM Online 2015 Update 1 (currently in preview).

From the words of Andre himself:

I just noticed the new plugin/custom workflow tracing and logging functionality in my preview instance and now the content has been updated with the information: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328574.aspx#loggingandtracing

I think it is a great addition to the plugin/WF capability to keep track of the performance of the custom code where it might breaks.

Plus with this note: “If your custom code executes within a database transaction, and an exception occurs that causes a transaction rollback, all entity data changes by your code will be undone. However, the PluginTraceLog records will remain after the rollback completes.” the tracing functionality won’t interrupt the transaction as it happened today if I want to put custom logging functionality.

2 thoughts on “Tip #351: Tracing for plugins and custom workflow activities

  1. Shubh says:

    Hi Thanks for this informative article.

    We are upgrading from CRM 2011 to CRM 2016 and planned to implement a Plugin Logging Architecture.

    I came to know Plugin Trace Log not working on Dynamics CRM 2016 On-Premise when plugin registered in isolation mode run.

    should I leave to use “Plugin Trace Log” and should use custom logger using “log4net” library or something like that ??

    As we can not run our plugin in Sandbox isolation mode.
    Please suggest what will be the best practice to implement Plugin Logging ??

  2. Shubh says:

    Plugin Trace Log not working on Dynamics CRM 2016 On-Premise –
    https://community.dynamics.com/crm/f/117/t/189346

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