While working on a SharePoint 2013 implementation with a client this week I ran into an issue that I had not run into before and ended up having to do some debugging that I don't do regularly.
For this I ended up using request tracing in IIS to further isolate the issue and gather more information. This ended up providing me with the additional information I needed to resolve the problem. In the end the problem was with a machine.config file.
Since this was not something I have to do very often when working with SharePoint I thought I would share this for others that may have forgotten about this useful tool or have never had to use it.
Enable Failed Request Tracing
- Go into IIS, drop down the list of sites, select the site you want to enable tracing on
- In the right side you will see a Configure section as below, Click on Failed Request Tracing
- On the next screen check to enable
- You can create a new rule to capture an error code range if you have an idea of the error code
- Double click on Failed Request Tracing Rules
- Click Add
- Click Next
- Enter in the desired error code range
- Click Finish
- Generate the error that you are troubleshooting
- Once the error has been generated go to the web front end server and look in the directory specified in the trace logging setting you set
- You will see an XML file in that location, open the XML file in a browser
- You will see the information on what has been captured. Take note of the frame mentioned in the error
- Click on Compact view and scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see more specific error information
