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As somebody who tried to use ETW, I can say that the OP didn't do his homework. Everything you need to know about ETW is described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb96...

ETW is much more than a simple logging system; the description says "Use ETW when you want to instrument your application, log user or kernel events to a log file, and consume events from a log file or in real time. ".

It allows broadcast (multiple consumers), structured binary data, filtering based on data structure, etc. It is an immensely powerful system (See manifest-based events above). In addition to everything it does, it is also designed for performance and for not using too much space.

Re my attempt to use ETW: I began to drool when reading the docs; it would be immensely useful in my project. However, the product must also work on Linux, and building a cross-platform layer for something like ETW (even if the Linux counterpart is a no-op) would be an overkill. I might return to it one day.



So, "as somebody who tried to use ETW", you think that the author, who did in fact actually use ETW, didn't do his homework?

Read the criticisms. They are not shallow.


From the article: "It is a logging system, and it is used to record performance and debugging information by everything from the kernel upwards."

It's apparent that he did not do his homework. ETW is much closer to DTrace than to syslog (e.g., you can turn on and off certain events in a running application w/o disruption).

EDIT: It seems that the author uses ETW as an excuse for writing a rant about how an API should be designed according to his taste. Powerful, low-level APIs are difficult to use. Simple as that.




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