Enabling and Viewing SharePoint Tracing

Enabling Tracing on the Client Browser

Some basic client browser level tracing is available from the SharePoint application. To enable, append the following to your current browser location (URL) query string.

?JiveDebug=true
Example: http://sharepointurl?JiveDebug=true

Note: Please note the uppercase "J" and "D" in JiveDebug. The value for JiveDebug is case sensitive.

The following screen shot shows a sample of the client tracing output.

Note: You will not immediately see the trace output on the screen. Make sure to scroll beyond the normal screen presentation and you will see the trace output.

Enabling Tracing on the SharePoint Server

To enable tracing on the SharePoint server see the Farm Configuration for Jive. You must perform an IISRESET on SharePoint after changing this setting for the setting to take effect. In addition, this must be done on every SharePoint web front end to enable tracing for all SharePoint activity within Pointer for Jive.

Viewing Trace Output

There are two techniques to view tracing output:

Looking in the SharePoint ULS logs
Using DebugView

Viewing Output in the SharePoint ULS Logs

The SharePoint ULS logs are, by default, in a directory such as "C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS" on the SharePoint server, but this is defined in Central Administration (Operations -> Diagnostics Logging). Go to that directory and find the file with the latest update timestamp. You may need to wait a few seconds for the latest updates to show up.

Open the file with the latest changes, go to the bottom, and start looking for anything with "[Jive.SharePoint.Tracing]" in it.

Viewing Output with DebugView

DebugView is a tool that will let you watch real-time tracing. You can download DebugView, run it on the SharePoint server, and simply watch for trace messages to appear. You may want to set a filter (Edit -> Filter/Highlight) to "[Jive.SharePoint.Tracing]" to only get Jive SharePoint trace messages. You may also need to capture Win32 message (Capture -> Win32 and/or Capture -> Global Win32).

Note: DebugView has been known to not work in Windows Server 2008 under some configurations.