RoleEntryPoint trace calls are not being logged using the 2.0 Azure SDK for Cloud Services

Question

Scottgu just announced the 2.0 SDK: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/04/30/announcing-the-release-of-windows-azure-sdk-2-0-for-net.aspx

I tried creating a new MVC4 site. Added it to a cloud project and the following diagnostic setup was included as expected.

  <system.diagnostics>
    <trace>
      <listeners>
        <add type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener, Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
          name="AzureDiagnostics">
          <filter type="" />
        </add>
      </listeners>
    </trace>
  </system.diagnostics>

According to : https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/diagnostics/ the Windows Azure logs are on at default and

Logs trace messages sent from your code to the trace listener (a trace listener must be added to the web.config or app.config file). Log data will be transferred at thescheduledTransferPeriodtransfer interval to storage tableWADLogsTable.

the diagnostic.wadcfg :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<DiagnosticMonitorConfiguration configurationChangePollInterval="PT1M" overallQuotaInMB="4096" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2010/10/DiagnosticsConfiguration">
  <DiagnosticInfrastructureLogs />
  <Directories>
    <IISLogs container="wad-iis-logfiles" />
    <CrashDumps container="wad-crash-dumps" />
  </Directories>
  <Logs bufferQuotaInMB="1024" scheduledTransferPeriod="PT1M" scheduledTransferLogLevelFilter="Verbose" />
  <WindowsEventLog bufferQuotaInMB="1024" scheduledTransferPeriod="PT1M" scheduledTransferLogLevelFilter="Error">
    <DataSource name="Application!*" />
  </WindowsEventLog>
</DiagnosticMonitorConfiguration>

I placed a Trace.TraceError in both my global.cs and webrole.cs start methods and I do only get the one from global.cs.

Am i missing something or should it not also work for the WebRole?

Answer 1

WebRole.cs is running in a different process than your application itself and your web.config does not affect it.

Try setting the Trace Listeners manually in code:

Trace.Listeners.Add(new Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener());

or use a solution from here:

Reading config files from RoleEntryPoint and your web site: Even though the preferred way of storing configuration in Windows Azure applications is in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file, there are still many cases when you may want to use a normal .NET config file - especially when configuring .NET system components or reusable frameworks. In particular whenever you use Windows Azure diagnostics you need to configure the DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener in a .NET config file.

When you create your web role project, Visual Studio creates a web.config file for your .NET configuration. While your web application can access this information, your RoleEntryPoint code cannot-because it's not running as a part of your web site. As mentioned earlier, it runs under a process called WaIISHost.exe, so it expects its configuration to be in a file called WaIISHost.exe.config. Therefore, if you create a file with this name in the your web project and set the "Copy to Output Directory" property to "Copy Always" you'll find that the RoleEntryPoint can read this happily. This is one of the only cases I can think of where you'll have two .NET configuration files in the same project!