I followed the KB article from MS in order to turn on MSDTC trace. Unfortunately it was hard to follow, since it doesn’t assume a very reasonable and obvious expectation of the reader, specifically “how do I read this binary log file?” I read this page from MSDN as well, where I find that I can’t read the log file because I’m missing some executable called tracefmt.exe, and I’m apparently the only one anywhere with this problem.
Hence my question: Why don’t I have tracefmt.exe and where do I get it? or, to get to the point: How do I read my MSDTC trace logs?
tracefmt (and traceview which is easier to use) are available in the Windows Driver Kit (WDK). It is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=11800. It is in the WDK since this tracing technology is more commonly used in device drivers.