As covered in the Collecting events from WCF and WF services recipe of this chapter, Windows Server AppFabric provides a number of tracking profiles out of the box which allow you to monitor your WCF and WF service application with varying degrees of detail (to learn more about working with preconfigured tracking profiles, please see the references at the end of this recipe).
While the tracking profiles provided out of the box provide a wide range of coverage, sometimes it is helpful to gain a deeper insight, at the activity, variable, and argument level as to what is happening inside of the activities within a workflow.
Custom Tracking Profiles provide a way to extend Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) as a tracking participant, opting activities, variables, and arguments into a custom tracking profile defined by the etwTracking service behavior.
This means that the custom tracking profiles you build offer the same performance as the out...