SharePoint trace service keeps getting disabled

Fri, Feb 23, 2018 One-minute read

Continuing the theme of obscure SharePoint gotchas you’re unlikely to encounter (unless, I assume, you’re reading this) here’s another. One environment was experiencing an issue whereby the SharePoint Tracing Service was constantly getting set to disabled. No amount of editing it in services.msc to set it to Automatic would ‘take’ - that is, you could enable it and start it and it would work - but then at some miscellaneous point later it would mysteriously revert to being disabled.

The issue is one of the SP Health Timer jobs, where, for whatever reason, thinks it needs to disable the job.

Fortunately it’s easy to find out using some Powershell:

((Get-SPFarm).Services | where {$_.Name -match "SPTraceV4"}).instances | Format-List

If the ‘Status’ is ‘disabled’ then, well, it’s disabled.

TO enable it again:

Start-SPServiceInstance -Identity <Id>

Replacing with the guid from the previous command.

Answer (and explanation) found on StackExchange.