Puneet Ghanshani

Chief Architect at Microsoft

3 minute read

When you use Team Foundation Server for Build Automation, you can configure build controller and agents.  In the Team Foundation Administration Console, you can view the Logs however these logs provide minimal information.  Even the Event Viewer provides minimal event logging rather than extensive logging.  Now even if these Logs or Event Viewer provide you information that you require, there may be cases that you do not have complete access to the build server and this build server is managed by your organization’s support groups.

In this case, you can enable detailed level logs of build service so that you can read the logs in Read Only mode without having to login to the server.  Note that this log file will have build information of all agents running on the controller and not specific to an agent.  So if you are using a Shared Build Controller, everyone with access to this log file will have information about your builds too.

To get started, you need to manually create a configuration file with following content,

  1. <configuration>
  2.     <system.diagnostics>
  3.         <switches>
  4.             <add name="BuildServiceTraceLevel" value="4"/>
  5.         </switches>
  6.         <trace autoflush="true" indentsize="4">
  7.             <listeners>
  8.                 <add name="myListener" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TeamFoundationTextWriterTraceListener,Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" initializeData="c:\Build\TFSBuildlogs\TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.log" />
  9.          <remove name="Default" />
  10.             </listeners>
  11.         </trace>
  12.     </system.diagnostics>
  13. </configuration>

 

Name this file as TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.config

You can customize this configuration file by adding more trace listeners or even changing the location of build log file from C:\Build\TFSBuildlogs (create if it does not exist).  If you are sharing this path with multiple teams, please make sure you only give Read Only rights to all parties.

As the name suggests, this is a configuration file for TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.  On your build server, you can locate this executable at -

%programfiles%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools

You can copy this file in the above path.  If you are using Windows Server 2008/2012, it will validate your Administrative Privileges with UAC.

Ensure that no builds are in active state.  Start the Command Prompt with ‘Run As Administrator’ privileges and execute these commands

net stop tfsbuildservicehost
net start tfsbuildservicehost

This will restart the TFSBuildServiceHost service and voila! The log files will detailed logging will be created at C:\Build\TFSBuildlogs

Note: This has been tested on TFS 2012 / 2013.  I’ve not tested this on older versions of TFS.

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