I had not expected to finish two extensions on the same day. Maybe it happened because I was sick the last two days and now feel much better. Anyway, besides the customization comparer that I published a few hours ago, the Stunnware Tools application now also contains the Trace File Viewer. It's a free extension and can be used in the Community Edition without any limitation.

Purpose of this extension

Sometimes weird things happen in Microsoft CRM and the error messages provided are not always helpful. The good news is that CRM provides a powerful logging mechanism, called CRM tracing. To enable tracing, please refer to the appropriate Microsoft KB Article.

The bad thing about these trace files are that they are hard to read and analyze. If you don't know what exactly to look for, then it can be a very time-consuming process. The Trace File Viewer allows easy parsing of such files and offers a variety of filtering options.

How it works

To analyze a trace file, select the Open command from the Trace Files main menu:

Select the file to analyze and click the Open button. Depending on the file size, it will take a few seconds (5MB) up to a minute (100MB) or longer to open and parse and display the file:

You can filter the data by any displayed value. Just hover over the column headers and click the small filter symbol:

A dropdown appears, containing all available values:

After selecting a value, the list only displays the entries matching the filter. The current filter criteria is shown at the bottom:

You can apply additional filters or do a free search by clicking the Edit Filter button. If you want to view the original entry, simply double-click a row:

I hope it's saving you a lot of time when dealing with log files.