Abstract

Trace Compass is an extensible open source trace visualiser. It is used by a wide community to analyse and visualise large traces from distributed systems. We will present and demonstrate Trace Compass with emphasis on recent additions to Trace Compass, contributed by Ericsson, Polytechnique Montreal and the wider community. The most notable change is the rearchitecture of Trace Compass into a separate frontend and backend, communicating through the Trace Server Protocol (TSP). This allowed the development of a new Web frontend based on the Theia IDE. TSP also makes trace analyses easily accessible for automated processing, for instance in continuous software integration. A new module was also added to Trace Compass to make its functionality available through Python and JavaScript, allowing the rapid prototyping of new analyses and views. This has proven extremely popular with users.

Biography

Michel Dagenais is professor at Polytechnique Montreal in the department of Computer and Software Engineering. He authored or co-authored numerous scientific publications as well as free documents and free software packages in the fields of operating systems, distributed systems and multicore systems, in particular in the area of tracing and monitoring Linux systems for performance analysis. Most of his research projects are in collaboration with industry and generate free software tools among the outcomes. Trace Compass, developed at Ericsson, in collaboration with Polytechnique Montreal and a wider community, is used throughout the world.

Target Audience

The target audience is software engineers working on software development, system monitoring or system performance, especially in performance sensitive areas such as Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing, and Real-time embedded systems.