[criddell]

If you work on Windows applications, check out Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). The best place to start is Bruce Dawson’s blog:

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/etw-central/

[yakubin]

In my opinion, the best way to interact with ETW is through DTrace. Microsoft’s GUIs like WPA-Xperf are so buggy and unreliable that using them feels utterly futile. DTrace on Windows on the other hand is very usable.

[maccard]

If you're working with ETW traces, SuperLuminal [0] (no affiliation just a happy customer) is leaps and bounds ahead of the built-in ETW viewer.

[0] https://superluminal.eu/

[RicoElectrico]

Isn't ETW a total trainwreck from a developer usability standpoint? Or so my colleagues (and the interwebs) tell me.

[criddell]

I don’t think so. The ability to keep drilling down deeper and deeper and the amazing sort and grouping functionality make it supremely useful.

The other tool I didn’t mention is WinDbg. In my opinion, it’s the greatest debugger on any platform.

[RicoElectrico]

Finally found it: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0025

[criddell]

Ah, I see. When you said developer usability I was thinking of the Windows Performance Analyzer UI, not the Windows Events API.

That’s a great blog post. Thanks for sharing it.