A framework for systematic analysis of event traces for software debugging and optimization

As computational systems grow more and more complex, their debugging and performance optimization becomes a challenging task. Tracing, which is recording of events during run-time, can provide helpful data on a system's behavior. One problem is that tracing can generate a huge amount of data, and it is not easy for the developer to extract exactly the information needed. What is needed is analysis to process the data, raise the level of abstraction and support the developer in finding what he needs. We believe that tracing in complex systems becomes even more efficient when used to combine several sources of information. This can be application traces, operating system kernel events, hardware, or communication traces. For many of those classes of information, there exist tracing and monitoring solutions. But unfortunately, each of them comes as a tightly coupled trace collection, analysis and vilsualization bundle, and thus, it can only be used to answer a narrow range of questions. We aim to provide a flexible trace analysis solution that can handle and integrate different trace sources, is easy to adapt to new analysis scenarios and can be used to model abstract description of trace analysis workflows.