This feature is mainly for developers. Microsoft has added new classes which help to log and trace the errors and exceptions.
- Developer Dashboard: This records the time, resources used for a particular web page request and shows on the UI.
- Request usage database: This database contains all the information about requests and resource usage.
- SPMonitoredScope: This is the attribute and if you apply this to a class then you can save the complete details to the SharePoint usage database.
- With new API features it is very easy to implement or communicate with ULS logs by using SPDiagnosticsServiceBase class.
If you have not already done so, I highly recommend you download the ULS Viewer tool. It allows admins and developers to open a ULS log file and display its contents in a user friendly format. Users can then perform advanced functions such as filtering, sorting, highlighting, loading logs, appending logs, etc in order to single out the data that is important to the user. This information can be used to diagnose problems with machines running ULS services, or to monitor machines and the events they create in real-time.