I uninstalled AppFabric Beta 2 and installed AppFabric RC.

The AppFabricEventCollection Service is started (runs under Local Service which is a dbo_owner on the Monitoring Database to prove this wasn’t the issue).

The SQLServerAgent Service is started.

Nothing is being written to the Monitoring DB Staging Table and thus nothing is being written to the Event tables or seen in the AppFabric Dashboard.

Nothing has been written to the following event logs

    - Microsoft-Windows-Application Server-System Services\Admin

    - Microsoft-Windows-Application Server-System Services\Operational

The Microsoft-Windows-Application Server-System Services\Debug event log is not shown in the event viewer.

The WCF configuration appears fine the connection string to the Monitoring DB is correct. Monitoring is set to “Trouble Shooting” and no errors are shown on the “Configure WCF and WF for Application” dialog.

So the problem seems to lie with either AppFabric which writes to the event log or the AppFabricEventCollection Service.

I thought I was flummoxed...

However one of my colleagues said have you checked the etwProviderId? I was using a config which was created under AppFabric  Beta 2 which had a different etwProviderId. So I deleted the following section and all other references to AppFabric monitoring from the web.config and then recreated them using IIS the “Configure WCF and WF for Application” dialog and set the level to TroubleShooting.

        <diagnostics etwProviderId="6b44a7ff-9db4-4723-b8cf-1b584bf1591b">

            <endToEndTracing propagateActivity="true" messageFlowTracing="true" />

        </diagnostics>

I then called a service to create some log entries. Still nothing was written to the Monitoring DB Staging Table...

I checked the Microsoft-Windows-Application Server-System Services\Admin event log. It had the following entry...

Configuration error. Please see the details to correct the problem. \rDetailed information:\r Filename: \\?\C:\Users\xxx\Documents\dotnetdev\Frameworks\SOA\xxx.SOA.Framework\xxx.SOA.Framework.MockServices\SimpleServiceParent\web.config

Error: Cannot read configuration file due to insufficient permissions

 System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Filename: \\?\C:\Users\xxx\Documents\dotnetdev\Frameworks\SOA\xxx.SOA.Framework\IAG.SOA.Framework.MockServices\SimpleServiceParent\web.config

Error: Cannot read configuration file due to insufficient permissions

And guess who the user was... Local Service yes yes I should have used a better User in the AppFabric RC setup to run the AppFabricEventCollection Service under!

So I changed the user to a more appropriate one and removed Local Service as a DBO and hay presto!