Intellitrace on Azure Cloud Services not updating

Question

I have Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and have been loving the Intellitrace feature against my cloud services instances. It has been working well but prior to upgrading the entire stack to .net 4.5 and relevant updates, realised it was not updating.

It is enabled and I can retrieve logs in VS but they only ever include the first few minutes of the startup. They never include any activity after that.

The diagnostics store on the server supports this, where the last update time on the trace files match what I see. I have updated everything now including the SDK to 2.3. I have recreated the servers in another datacentre so completely fresh, yet still no joy in getting this to work. I now have an issue which could be fixed in five minutes with this and I can't resolve it.

How can I go about troubleshooting this as I can't find anything online. The process intellitracesc.exe (32bit) is running on the server.

Answer 1

After recreating the azure project step by step all day until I broke it, I have some great assistance which I couldn't find elsewhere online.

For Intellitrace to collect information to provide back to Visual Studio, the apppools that it is using must be set to load user profile. If it does not it will fail to collect any information.

This is the default behavior of Azure, but I have a powershell script that moves all smaller sites in their own app pool to a newly created one. This saves memory for small sites and the powershell creation by default sets this to false.

Hope this saves someone else several days!!