Complex traces you can actually understand by leveraging Activity Tracing
Activity tracing is part of a feature that was initially introduced with WCF, named End-to-End Tracing. Its underlying implementation, however, is baked into the XmlWriterTraceListener and does not depend on WCF in any way. Currently it's only supported in the SystemDiagnostics implementation.
So what is activity tracing? It can be summarized as:
Activity tracing are special traces that record the processing flow across threads, processes and even machines, allowing for later correlation
The activities are identified by an arbitrary guid, which is
placed in the
ambient singleton
property
Trace.CorrelationManager.ActivityId. This ID flows with threads, and in the case of WCF, you
can make it flow across processes and machines. This ID must
be logged somehow, however, to be picked by a tool that can
correlate the traces. For that purpose, this ID is tracked
via...