Tracing

Stigg · Dec 16, 2023

I have tried to find out exactly what Tracing is used for.
Tracing registry entries are found at the following location.

Code:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Tracing

You may be surprised what entries have been created in there. Even old software that you no longer use.
I have deleted a couple of old entries, and so far, I haven't noticed anything amiss.

There is not a lot of information about tracing out there, but I found two rather old articles, with the latter one being more relevant.

Preventing WCF Tracing Registry Entries for RASAPI32 and RASMANCS

We have a queue service that, for each item, will take a template .exe file, copy it to a unique name base on the item, and use Process.Start to spin the exe up. This is done to ensure that each i...

stackoverflow.com

"Tracing" Malicious Downloads

In this blog post, I will be covering a very interesting artifact found in the Windows registry, which indicates whenever an executable (i.e. legitimate and illegitimate) attempted to establish a network connection to download files for the first time.

www.allthingsdfir.com

Do any of you guys know more about these tracing registry entries?

pseymour · Dec 16, 2023

Generally speaking, tracing is a thing software developers do to log events from their application or driver. They can then use these logs to debug or monitor those events in real-time.

I would say it's mostly used for performance monitoring and such, but it really can be used for anything where you want to see events happen quickly.

For example, in an application I maintain, I use Windows built-in process tracing to know when processes are created and destroyed, so I can log certain ones to a different log (outside of the tracing logs).