You want to log the traffic between the client (i.e. ArcMap) and an ArcSDE database.

Solution:

In the Command Window, write:

>set SDEINTERCEPTLOC = c:\tempclient
>c:\program files\arcgis\bin\arcmap.exe

It’s important to start the client (ArcMap in the above example) from the command prompt. ArcMap will intercept the traffic and log it to temp files, named like this:

c:\tempclient.001, c:\tempclient.002, and so on.