ASP.NET has a feature called tracing, which according to the ASP.NET Trace documentation “… allows you to view diagnostic information about a single request for an ASP.NET page simply by enabling it for your page or application.” If you’ve used ColdFusion before, you’re probably yawning, “.. we’ve had debugging since version 3.0..”, but wait, it gets cooler. You can also view the information from a page (Trace.axd) called the “trace viewer”, which allows you to view detailed information the last N requests (read: requests that other people have made to your site), which would/could be extremely helpful during any phase of development, including production. Unlike ColdFusion, you configure this per application in the web.config file:

<trace
   enabled=”true”
 traceMode=”SortByCategory”
 requestLimit=”40″
 pageOutput=”false”
 localOnly=”false”
/>

Anyone know if there is a tool like this for servlet containers? Or if certain servlet containers support something like this?