• Added support for using TLS 1.2 to access the Citrix Symbol Server.
  
• Added support for saving TMF files downloaded during parsing to the local cache path at C:ProgramDataCitrixCDFControlTMFCache. This approach accelerates trace parsing.
  
• Updated .Net Framework from Version 2.0 to 4.5.1.
• Fixed an issue where CDFControl cannot find the modules of Citrix Workspace app.
• Accelerated trace parsing for .NET programming.
• Fixed an issue where CDFControl reports the error 'TMF file not found for AOT traces.'
• Fixed an issue where the LonglongX formatting type is not indexed in TMF caches.
• Added support for multithreading and multiprocessing.
• Fixed an issue where Parse Trace to File cannot always parse all lines.
• Added CDF metadata support for .NET trace in the Comments field.
• Fixed an issue where a blank filter might cause a null pointer exception.
• Fixed an issue where the CPU field is always 0.
• Fixed an issue where some PVS traces cannot be parsed.
• AOT trace parsing.
• AOT trace highlighting.
• Added a limitation on the number of files of multiple sequential logs captured.
• Changed the color for error highlighting from black on red to yellow on red.
• Added new trace modules for Citrix Receiver and Citrix Workspace app.
• Fixed a crash issue that occurs when parsing Receiver AOT traces.
• Enhanced search to all TMF search paths for certain GUIDs to traverse the TMF file for all platforms.
• Added a setting to highlight errors and warnings automatically.
• Added a setting to enable PVS-specific.NET trace parsing format.
• Made the content of the trace class column more concise.
• Added missing modules for the local app access and printing features.
• Added support for parsing traces by using the time zone of the machine being traced.
• Introduced a warning dialog when you start tracing without selecting any module.
• Changed the default configuration to multiple sequential modes.
• Added the session tree of the DLL dependency list for processes.
• Added support for PVS.NET trace output with detailed columns.
• Signed binary files with SHA-256 to improve security.
• Changed the directory timestamp to 24-hour format.
• Introduced support for modifying and inserting custom trace messages in the Remote tracing dialog.
• Enhanced remote tracing support on Windows 10.
• Solved User Access Control (UAC) issues on Windows 7 and Windows 10.
• Introduced support to help parse multiple trace files (maximum 63 files) to a single output file. The trace messages are automatically sorted by message timestamp.
• Added a time filter option to help parse only trace messages in a specific time period.
• Moved to a new Citrix public symbol server since Version 3.0.2.0.
• Enhanced filtering to include filtering by column header, multiple rules, parsing filter, and more. Use the column header filter to filter the tracing from the column header; use multiple filtering rules to the current log at the same time; the parsing filter supports filtering by regular expression in real-time tracing and ETL parsing.
• Enhanced overall performance such as lowering memory consumption and increasing parsing speeds.
  
• Introduced a module filter that allows you to search for specific modules by binary or module name.
• Added support for inserting custom trace statements to a running trace to mark the occurrence of specific events.
• Added a comment column for traces. Use this feature to add your findings to the comments column, save them to a CSV file, and share.
• Introduced session/process information support for remote tracing.
• Introduced support for HPC (High Performance Client) tracing. CDFControl supports collecting HPC tracing logs on Windows machines with Citrix Receiver 4.1.100 or later installed. Internal users can view real-time HPC tracing logs. The original HPC tracing pattern was not changed. You can still enable the original HPC tracing.
• Enabled highlighting. Use this feature to highlight rows in the viewer to distinguish them from others.
• Introduced support for custom column display. Use this feature to decide which columns you want to display or hide.
• Introduced an Add Filter Logic function for the multi-rules filter. Use this feature to define your own filter logic for multiple rules rather than the fixed AND logic of earlier versions.

Prerequisites

• CDFControl requires Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 2008 R2 SP1 or later, each with .NET 4.5.1 or later installed.
  
• Run the tool as a user with administrator privileges for all features to be functional.
  
• For UAC, only trace capture requires elevation. For more information, see the user guide (CDFControl Menu > Help).
  
• Windows Remote Management (WinRM) has been enabled and configured properly on remote machines.
• The remote registry service has been enabled on the remote machines.
• File and printer sharing has been enabled on the remote machines.
• PowerShell 3.0 or later is available on the remote machines.
• The machine where the tool runs shares a domain with the remote machines.

Installing CDFControl

To install CDFControl, copy the CDFControl.exe executable file to the desired location. For Windows 8 and later, you must copy CDFControl.exe.config as well. No installer is required.

Cdf File Reader File

The CDFControl Version 2 includes the following for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions:

• CDFControl.exe
  (Can be run standalone)
• CDFControl.exe.config
  (Necessary only for Windows 8 and later)

The first time you launch the tool, the application extracts the following configuration file to the same folder as CDFControl.exe:

• CDFControl.xml
  (Configuration file)

How to Use CDFControl

See the user guide (CDFControl Menu > Help) for full usage instructions.

Note: Parse Trace consumes more memory than Parse Trace to File. Consider using Parse Trace to File when you parse large ETL files.

CDFControl AOT Features

AOT trace parsing

Cdf File Format Reader

CDFControl v3.3 and later-supports parsing the always-on tracing (AOT) traces.

To parse the AOT traces, do the same as common trace parsing.

AOT trace highlighting

You can highlight AOT traces for differentiation. Choose Tools and then Options. Select the highlighted AOT in the viewer check box to turn on/off AOT trace highlighting. AOT trace highlighting is enabled by default.

Security Permissions Required by CDFControl

Administrator privileges are required for all features to be functional.

Data Modified by CDFControl

• For dynamic TMF download, TMF files are temporarily stored in the user’s temp directory. These files are deleted automatically after use.
• If remote tracing is used, a few temporary files are generated.
  For more information, see the Remote Tracing section in the user guide (CDFControl Menu > Help).
• CDFControl captures traces. As a result, trace files are present on the machine being traced.
• You can export trace template settings to XML and CTL files.

Uninstalling CDFControl

To uninstall CDFControl and undo changes made to the system, delete all files generated in the same folder as CDFControl.exe.

Contact Information

Questions? Concerns? Send any feedback on this tool to CDFControl Feedback.

Many Citrix administrators are complaining, that it’s very hard to debug errors in Citrix products. Some times you can switch logging (for example in XenDesktop DDC or VDA). Another time you can find some information in Windows event log. But what about deep debugging. For that purpose Citrix released (in 2007) special tool – CDFControl [CTX111961]. It’s not a problem to collect logs. But how to open them after that? There is a tool – CDFAnalyzer [CTX122741]. So, let’s start:

Load CDFLogFile.etl (generated by CDFControl) into CDFAnalyzer:

Cdf File Reader Software

In the message column we’ve got some strange strings:

That means, the we didn’t have “symbols” to solve that GUID strings. For downloading that files we will use another Citrix tool – CDFMonitor [CTX129537]. Start the command line, go to CDFMonitor directory and type:

Cdf File Reader For Mac

CDFMonitor will ask you for your credentials for citrix.com. I was able to download symbols with and without my username (just clicking “Cancel“):

After that you will see how many TMF files will be downloaded (20963 in that case):

In my case (I have pretty good Internet connection) it tooks about 2 hours to download them all (210MB)

Now, when we have all the TMF files we can configure CDFAnalyzer to use them. From menu choose “Tools” and the “Properties” and put the whole path where TMF files are located.

At the end, load again out traces – CDFLogFile.etl. Voilà 🙂

Note: Periodically refresh all your TMF files from citrix website. Today I’ve downloaded 20963 files. Previous time (2 weeks ago) I got “only” 20760 files. So there are 203 more symbols. And before downloading new files remember to backup the old ones (just in case).