Installation
ETW and xperf were famous for their very cumbersome usage, and that is maybe the reason why ETW is not more widely known. It has improved a lot since then, but we will nonetheless use a GUI tool, aptly named UI for ETW, written by Bruce Dawson, who was so kind as to make the barely usable tools approachable by everyone. To install UI for ETW, go to https://github.com/google/UIforETW/releases, download the current distribution (etwpackage1.49.zip), unpack it, and start the installer. The installer will automatically fetch a matching version of WPT for your machine, if there isn't one already. When UI for ETW is started, it shows the following window:
When the Start Tracing button is clicked, UI for ETW will start to continuously collect ETW traces and write them into a circular memory buffer. When we want to save the current contents of the trace buffer, we have to click on the Save Trace Buffers button, or just use the Ctrl+Win+R shortcut from anywhere. We will then see the last-recorded trace in a list, as we can see from the following screenshot: