Tracing Summit 2013: LTTng: Cloud Monitoring and Distribution Bug Reporting with Live Streaming and Snapshots

The latest developments in LTTng include features relevant for use-cases ranging from Linux distribution bug report data collection to cloud monitoring. Amongst those features, we notably find the live streaming of traces over the network, which allows analysis of live traces as the are being gathered. We also find flight recorder tracing, with non-stop snapshot feature, which allows augmenting distribution bug reports with a trace of events that precede each bug. Those features will be presented, along with discussion of the project roadmap.

Tracing Summit 2013

EfficiOS co-organized the Tracing Summit 2013 event co-located with the Linux Foundation LinuxCon Europe 2013 in Edinburgh, UK held last October.

The main target of this one day conference was to provide room for discussion between people in the various areas that benefit from tracing, namely parallel, distributed and/or real-time systems, as well as kernel development.

LinuxCon Europe 2013: Hands-on Tutorial on Scalability with Userspace RCU

As the number of cores in systems steadily increases, you may find that the good old mutual exclusion synchronization is not sufficient to let your application use more cores not only for heat generation, but primarily for effective computing. The Userspace RCU library (http://lttng.org/urcu) implements Read-Copy Update (RCU) synchronization and various lock-free data structures that allow user-space applications to leverage very lightweight synchronization across cores. It allows a broad range of demanding applications to scale to large numbers of cores. This library is released under LGPL v2.1, so it can be used by all applications. This tutorial will walk the audience through the basics of Read-Copy Update, and then through the synchronization and data structure APIs exposed by Userspace RCU.

LinuxCon Europe 2013: LTTng as a new monitoring tool

In the past, much effort has been invested in high performance kernel tracing tools, but now focus in the tracing community seems to be shifting over to efficient user space application tracing. By providing joint kernel and user space tracing, developers now have deeper insights in their applications. Furthermore, system administrators can now put in place a new way to monitor and debug systems using a low instrusivness tracing system, LTTng. This presentation explains how LTTng can be used as a powerful monitoring tool for an entire farm of servers taking advantage of this year exciting new features such as network streaming and snapshot. This shows hands on how to leverage tracing in a production environment to monitor and debug system by showing use cases of real system using such a tools for monitoring.

CloudOpen Europe 2013: Efficient and Large-scale Infrastructure Monitoring with Tracing

Tracing is a powerful tool to help solve problems in high-performance multi-threaded applications. There are success stories of custom application tracers deployed in large distributed environments, but we almost never see a low-level system tracer deployed in such environments. With the features introduced in LTTng during the last year, we can now extract remotely and in real-time relevant informations about running production servers efficiently. We will demonstrate how LTTng can be deployed in a cloud infrastructure (0penStack) to extract high-precision metrics remotely, how to enable/disable kernel and user-space events dynamically, and how to extract traces on crashes. This presentation will give system administrators a new perspective on how to monitor and debug production servers in large-scale data-centers.