Trace Type Summary

Source Levels defines various trace levels: Critical, Error, Warning, Information, and Verbose, as well as provides description of the ActivityTracing flag, which toggles the output of trace boundary and activity transfer events.

You can also review TraceEventType for the types of traces which can be emitted from System.Diagnostics.

The following table lists the most important ones.

Trace Type	Description
Critical	Fatal error or application crash.
Error	Recoverable error.
Warning	Informational message.
Information	Non-critical problem.
Verbose	Debugging trace.
Start	Starting of a logical unit of processing.
Suspend	Suspension of a logical unit of processing.
Resume	Resumption of a logical unit of processing.
Stop	Stopping of a logical unit of processing.
Transfer	Changing of correlation identity.

An activity is defined as a combination of the trace types above.

The following is a regular expression that defines an ideal activity in a local (trace source) scope,

R = Start (Critical | Error | Warning | Information | Verbose | Transfer | (Transfer Suspend Transfer Resume) )* Stop

This means that an activity must satisfy the following conditions.

• It must start and stop respectively by a Start and Stop traces

• It must have a Transfer trace immediately preceding a Suspend or Resume trace

• It must not have any traces between the Suspend and Resume traces if such traces exist

• It can have any and as many of critical/Error/Warning/Information/Verbose/Transfer traces as long as the previous conditions are observed

The following is a regular expression that defines an ideal activity in the global scope,

R+ 

with R being the regular expression for an activity in the local scope. This translates to,

[R+ = Start ( Critical | Error | Warning | Information | Verbose | Transfer | (Transfer Suspend Transfer Resume) )* Stop]+