Tracing (software)

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Tracing in software engineering refers to the process of capturing and recording information about the execution of a software program. This information is typically used by programmers for debugging purposes, and additionally, depending on the type and detail of information contained in a trace log, by experienced system administrators or technical-support personnel and by software monitoring tools to diagnose common problems with software.[1] Tracing is a cross-cutting concern.

There is not always a clear distinction between tracing and other forms of logging, except that the term tracing is almost never applied to logging that is a functional requirement of a program (therefore excluding logging of data from an external source, such as data acquisition in a high-energy physics experiment, and write-ahead logging). Logs that record program usage (such as a server log) or operating-system events primarily of interest to a system administrator (see for example Event Viewer) fall into a terminological gray area.

Tracing is primarily used for anomaly detection, fault analysis, debugging or diagnostic purposes in distributed software systems, such as microservices or serverless functions.[2]

  1. ^ "The Tracing Book". Archived from the original on 2009-02-24.
  2. ^ Li, Bowen; Peng, Xin; Xiang, Qilin; Wang, Hanzhang; Xie, Tao; Sun, Jun; Liu, Xuanzhe (2022). "Enjoy your observability: an industrial survey of microservice tracing and analysis". Empirical Software Engineering. 27 (1): 25. doi:10.1007/s10664-021-10063-9. ISSN 1382-3256. PMC 8629732. PMID 34867075.