Using Enable Trace portlet

You can enable trace for portal server component temporarily by going to WebSphere Portal -> Administration -> Enable Trace Portlet.
For example you want to enable trace for PUMA then you can go to enable tracing portlet and add these strings

com.ibm.wps.puma.*=all
com.ibm.wps.services.puma.*=all

Note one very important thing that whatever changes you make in Enable tracing portlet will take effect immediately and will be lost when you restart the server. It is same as making changes using the runtime configuration tab in WAS Admin Console

Now your enable tracing portlet should look like this


Once your done debugging your problem you can disable the tracing by deleting all the trace string except *=INFO