Introduction to the Consolidated Tracing Facility

The Consolidated Tracing Facility (CTF) is a tracing infrastructure that enables you to quickly and easily produce diagnostic information detailing the operation of Micro Focus software components and your own programs.

To create tracing information using CTF, you need to set up the environment appropriately.

You also need to create a side file, the CTF configuration file, to define the tracing information you want to capture. For example, you can define:

• The application to trace. Tracing information of a number of Micro Focus software components can be enabled. See Components Traced by CTF .

  You can also produce tracing information for your own programs by using library routines that give you access to CTF infrastructure. See Consolidated Tracing Facility Routines.

• The severity level of tracing messages to capture. See CTF Configuration File.
• The emitters to produce the tracing information (such as text or binary). See Emitter List.

  If you choose binary tracing, you can use the CTF Viewer to examine binary format trace files easily. See CTF Viewer.

The trace information is displayed dynamically in a console, as soon as it occurs. There is one console for each process ID being debugged.