LinuxCon Europe + CloudOpen Europe

The many tracing tools available on Linux today provide a wide array of choices for the users. Deciding which of them to use to diagnose system problems on production systems can prove challenging. Various tools have various states of integration within the Linux kernel, and also within different Linux distributions. Bleeding edge features are often just being merged into the upstream Linux kernel. It takes often a long time for such features to be incorporated in commercial distributions. The required set up for the tools and their level of usability also vary significantly. This talk will cover the more popular and actively developed tracing areas focusing on their latest updates and will describe the infrastructure they rely on. An overview of the tracing tools (ftrace, perf, systemtap, DTrace for Linux, etc) will be included with some examples of usage of each.