How to enable build agent or build controller’s logs?
Here are the steps which I typically perform to enable build agent/controller logs.
1. Go to the build agent/controller installation directory (typically it is something like C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools).
2. Create a new configuration file named TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.config with the following content:
<configuration>
<system.diagnostics>
<switches>
<add name="BuildServiceTraceLevel" value="4"/>
</switches>
<trace autoflush="true" indentsize="4">
<listeners>
<add name="myListener" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TeamFoundationTextWriterTraceListener,Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" initializeData="c:\logs\TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.log" />
<remove name="Default" />
</listeners>
</trace>
</system.diagnostics>
</configuration>
3. Create a new directory named c:\logs and ensure that the account under which the service Visual Studio Team Foundation Build Service Host has write permission on c:\logs.
4. Restart the build controller/agent service (net stop tfsbuildservicehost & net start tfsbuildservicehost).
After this a log file named TFSBuildServiceHost.exe.log should get generated in c:\logs directory.