lttng-concepts - Man Page

LTTng concepts

Description

This manual page documents the concepts of LTTng.

Many other LTTng manual pages refer to this one so that you can understand what are the various LTTng objects and how they relate to each other.

The concepts of LTTng 2.13.14 are:

Instrumentation Point, Event Rule, and Event

An instrumentation point is a point, within a piece of software, which, when executed, creates an LTTng event.

LTTng offers various types of instrumentation; see the “Instrumentation point types” section below to learn about them.

An event rule is a set of conditions to match a set of events.

When LTTng creates an event E, an event rule ER is said to match E when E satisfies all the conditions of ER. This concept is similar to a regular expression which matches a set of strings.

When an event rule matches an event, LTTng emits the event, therefore attempting to execute one or more actions.
Important

The event creation and emission processes are documentation concepts to help understand the journey from an instrumentation point to the execution of actions.

The actual creation of an event can be costly because LTTng needs to evaluate the arguments of the instrumentation point.

In practice, LTTng implements various optimizations for the Linux kernel and user space tracing domains (see the “Tracing Domain” section below) to avoid actually creating an event when the tracer knows, thanks to properties which are independent from the event payload and current context, that it would never emit such an event. Those properties are:

  • The instrumentation point type (see the “Instrumentation point types” section below).
  • The instrumentation point name.
  • The instrumentation point log level.

  • For a recording event rule (see the “Recording Event Rule and Event Record” section below):

    • The status of the rule itself.
    • The status of the channel (see the “Channel and Ring Buffer” section below).
    • The activity of the recording session (started or stopped; see the “Recording Session” section below).
    • Whether or not the process for which LTTng would create the event is allowed to record events (see lttng-track(1)).

In other words: if, for a given instrumentation point IP, the LTTng tracer knows that it would never emit an event, executing IP represents a simple boolean variable check and, for a Linux kernel recording event rule, a few process attribute checks.

As of LTTng 2.13.14, there are two places where you can find an event rule:

Recording event rule

A specific type of event rule of which the action is to record the matched event as an event record.

See the “Recording Event Rule and Event Record” section below.

Create or enable a recording event rule with the lttng-enable-event(1) command.

List the recording event rules of a specific recording session and/or channel with the lttng-list(1) and lttng-status(1) commands.

“Event rule matches” trigger condition (since LTTng 2.13)

When the event rule of the trigger condition matches an event, LTTng can execute user-defined actions such as sending an LTTng notification, starting a recording session, and more.

See lttng-add-trigger(1) and lttng-event-rule(7).

For LTTng to emit an event E, E must satisfy all the basic conditions of an event rule ER, that is:

A recording event rule has additional, implicit conditions to satisfy. See the “Recording Event Rule and Event Record” section below to learn more.

Instrumentation point types

As of LTTng 2.13.14, the available instrumentation point types are, depending on the tracing domain (see the “Tracing Domain” section below):

Linux kernel

LTTng tracepoint

A statically defined point in the source code of the kernel image or of a kernel module using the LTTng-modules macros.

List the available Linux kernel tracepoints with lttng list --kernel. See lttng-list(1) to learn more.

Linux kernel system call

Entry, exit, or both of a Linux kernel system call.

List the available Linux kernel system call instrumentation points with lttng list --kernel --syscall. See lttng-list(1) to learn more.

Linux kprobe

A single probe dynamically placed in the compiled kernel code.

When you create such an instrumentation point, you set its memory address or symbol name.

Linux user space probe

A single probe dynamically placed at the entry of a compiled user space application/library function through the kernel.

When you create such an instrumentation point, you set:

With the ELF method

Its application/library path and its symbol name.

With the USDT method

Its application/library path, its provider name, and its probe name.

“USDT” stands for SystemTap User-level Statically Defined Tracing, a DTrace-style marker.

As of LTTng 2.13.14, LTTng only supports USDT probes which are NOT reference-counted.

Linux kretprobe

Entry, exit, or both of a Linux kernel function.

When you create such an instrumentation point, you set the memory address or symbol name of its function.

User space

LTTng tracepoint

A statically defined point in the source code of a C/C++ application/library using the LTTng-UST macros.

List the available Linux kernel tracepoints with lttng list --userspace. See lttng-list(1) to learn more.

java.util.logging, Apache log4j, and Python

Java or Python logging statement

A method call on a Java or Python logger attached to an LTTng-UST handler.

List the available Java and Python loggers with lttng list --jul, lttng list --log4j, and lttng list --python. See lttng-list(1) to learn more.

Trigger

A trigger associates a condition to one or more actions.

When the condition of a trigger is satisfied, LTTng attempts to execute its actions.

As of LTTng 2.13.14, the available trigger conditions and actions are:

Conditions
  • The consumed buffer size of a given recording session (see the “Recording Session” section below) becomes greater than some value.
  • The buffer usage of a given channel (see the “Channel and Ring Buffer” section below) becomes greater than some value.
  • The buffer usage of a given channel becomes less than some value.
  • There’s an ongoing recording session rotation (see the “Recording session rotation” section below).
  • A recording session rotation becomes completed.

  • An event rule matches an event.

    As of LTTng 2.13.14, this is the only available condition when you add a trigger with the lttng-add-trigger(1) command. The other ones are available through the liblttng-ctl C API.

Actions
  • Send a notification to a user application.
  • Start a given recording session, like lttng-start(1) would do.
  • Stop a given recording session, like lttng-stop(1) would do.
  • Archive the current trace chunk of a given recording session (rotate), like lttng-rotate(1) would do.
  • Take a snapshot of a given recording session, like lttng-snapshot(1) would do.

A trigger belongs to a session daemon (see lttng-sessiond(8)), not to a specific recording session. For a given session daemon, each Unix user has its own, private triggers. Note, however, that the root Unix user may, for the root session daemon:

For a given session daemon and Unix user, a trigger has a unique name.

Add a trigger to a session daemon with the lttng-add-trigger(1) command.

List the triggers of your Unix user (or of all users if your Unix user is root) with the lttng-list-triggers(1) command.

Remove a trigger with the lttng-remove-trigger(1) command.

Recording Session

A recording session (named “tracing session” prior to LTTng 2.13) is a stateful dialogue between you and a session daemon (see lttng-sessiond(8)) for everything related to event recording.

Everything that you do when you control LTTng tracers to record events happens within a recording session. In particular, a recording session:

Those attributes and objects are completely isolated between different recording sessions.

A recording session is like an ATM session: the operations you do on the banking system through the ATM don’t alter the data of other users of the same system. In the case of the ATM, a session lasts as long as your bank card is inside. In the case of LTTng, a recording session lasts from the lttng-create(1) command to the lttng-destroy(1) command.

A recording session belongs to a session daemon (see lttng-sessiond(8)). For a given session daemon, each Unix user has its own, private recording sessions. Note, however, that the root Unix user may operate on or destroy another user’s recording session.

Create a recording session with the lttng-create(1) command.

List the recording sessions of the connected session daemon with the lttng-list(1) command.

Start and stop a recording session with the lttng-start(1) and lttng-stop(1) commands.

Save and load a recording session with the lttng-save(1) and lttng-load(1) commands.

Archive the current trace chunk of (rotate) a recording session with the lttng-rotate(1) command.

Destroy a recording session with the lttng-destroy(1) command.

Current recording session

When you run the lttng-create(1) command, LTTng creates the $LTTNG_HOME/.lttngrc file if it doesn’t exist ($LTTNG_HOME defaults to $HOME).

$LTTNG_HOME/.lttngrc contains the name of the current recording session.

When you create a new recording session with the create command, LTTng updates the current recording session.

The following lttng(1) commands select the current recording session if you don’t specify one:

Set the current recording session manually with the lttng-set-session(1) command, without having to edit the .lttngrc file.

Recording session modes

LTTng offers four recording session modes:

Local mode

Write the trace data to the local file system.

Network streaming mode

Send the trace data over the network to a listening relay daemon (see lttng-relayd(8)).

Snapshot mode

Only write the trace data to the local file system or send it to a listening relay daemon (lttng-relayd(8)) when LTTng takes a snapshot.

LTTng forces all the channels (see the “Channel and Ring Buffer” section below) to be created to be configured to be snapshot-ready.

LTTng takes a snapshot of such a recording session when:

  • You run the lttng-snapshot(1) command.
  • LTTng executes a snapshot-session trigger action (see the “Trigger” section above).
Live mode

Send the trace data over the network to a listening relay daemon (see lttng-relayd(8)) for live reading.

An LTTng live reader (for example, babeltrace2(1)) can connect to the same relay daemon to receive trace data while the recording session is active.

Recording session rotation

A recording session rotation is the action of archiving the current trace chunk of the recording session to the file system.

Once LTTng archives a trace chunk, it does NOT manage it anymore: you can read it, modify it, move it, or remove it.

An archived trace chunk is a collection of metadata and data stream files which form a self-contained LTTng trace. See the “Trace chunk naming” section below to learn how LTTng names a trace chunk archive directory.

The current trace chunk of a given recording session includes:

  • The stream files which LTTng already wrote to the file system, and which are not part of a previously archived trace chunk, since the most recent event amongst:

    • The first time the recording session was started, either with the lttng-start(1) command or with a start-session trigger action (see the “Trigger” section above).

    • The last rotation, performed with:

  • The content of all the non-flushed sub-buffers of the channels of the recording session.

Trace chunk archive naming

A trace chunk archive is a subdirectory of the archives subdirectory within the output directory of a recording session (see the --output option of the lttng-create(1) command and of lttng-relayd(8)).

A trace chunk archive contains, through tracing domain and possibly UID/PID subdirectories, metadata and data stream files.

A trace chunk archive is, at the same time:

  • A self-contained LTTng trace.
  • A member of a set of trace chunk archives which form the complete trace of a recording session.

In other words, an LTTng trace reader can read both the recording session output directory (all the trace chunk archives), or a single trace chunk archive.

When LTTng performs a recording session rotation, it names the resulting trace chunk archive as such, relative to the output directory of the recording session:

archives/BEGIN-END-ID
BEGIN

Date and time of the beginning of the trace chunk archive with the ISO 8601-compatible YYYYmmddTHHMMSS±HHMM form, where YYYYmmdd is the date and HHMMSS±HHMM is the time with the time zone offset from UTC.

Example: 20171119T152407-0500

END

Date and time of the end of the trace chunk archive with the ISO 8601-compatible YYYYmmddTHHMMSS±HHMM form, where YYYYmmdd is the date and HHMMSS±HHMM is the time with the time zone offset from UTC.

Example: 20180118T152407+0930

ID

Unique numeric identifier of the trace chunk within its recording session.

Trace chunk archive name example:

archives/20171119T152407-0500-20171119T151422-0500-3

Tracing Domain

A tracing domain identifies a type of LTTng tracer.

A tracing domain has its own properties and features.

There are currently five available tracing domains:

Tracing domain“Event rule matches” trigger condition optionOption for other CLI commands
Linux kernel--type option starts with kernel:--kernel
User space--type option starts with user:--userspace
java.util.logging (JUL)--type option starts with jul:--jul
Apache log4j--type option starts with log4j:--log4j
Python--type option starts with python:--python

You must specify a tracing domain to target a type of LTTng tracer when using some lttng(1) commands to avoid ambiguity. For example, because the Linux kernel and user space tracing domains support named tracepoints as instrumentation points (see the “Instrumentation Point, Event Rule, and Event” section above), you need to specify a tracing domain when you create an event rule because both tracing domains could have tracepoints sharing the same name.

You can create channels (see the “Channel and Ring Buffer” section below) in the Linux kernel and user space tracing domains. The other tracing domains have a single, default channel.

Channel and Ring Buffer

A channel is an object which is responsible for a set of ring buffers.

Each ring buffer is divided into multiple sub-buffers. When a recording event rule (see the “Recording Event Rule and Event Record” section below) matches an event, LTTng can record it to one or more sub-buffers of one or more channels.

When you create a channel with the lttng-enable-channel(1) command, you set its final attributes, that is:

Note that the lttng-enable-event(1) command can automatically create a default channel with sane defaults when no channel exists for the provided tracing domain.

A channel is always associated to a tracing domain (see the “Tracing Domain” section below). The java.util.logging (JUL), log4j, and Python tracing domains each have a default channel which you can’t configure.

A channel owns recording event rules.

List the channels of a given recording session with the lttng-list(1) and lttng-status(1) commands.

Disable an enabled channel with the lttng-disable-channel(1) command.

Buffering scheme

A channel has at least one ring buffer per CPU. LTTng always records an event to the ring buffer dedicated to the CPU which emits it.

The buffering scheme of a user space channel determines what has its own set of per-CPU ring buffers:

Per-user buffering (--buffers-uid option of the lttng-enable-channel(1) command)

Allocate one set of ring buffers (one per CPU) shared by all the instrumented processes of:

If your Unix user is root

Each Unix user.

Otherwise

Your Unix user.

Per-process buffering (--buffers-pid option of the lttng-enable-channel(1) command)

Allocate one set of ring buffers (one per CPU) for each instrumented process of:

If your Unix user is root

All Unix users.

Otherwise

Your Unix user.

The per-process buffering scheme tends to consume more memory than the per-user option because systems generally have more instrumented processes than Unix users running instrumented processes. However, the per-process buffering scheme ensures that one process having a high event throughput won’t fill all the shared sub-buffers of the same Unix user, only its own.

The buffering scheme of a Linux kernel channel is always to allocate a single set of ring buffers for the whole system. This scheme is similar to the per-user option, but with a single, global user “running” the kernel.

Event record loss mode

When LTTng emits an event, LTTng can record it to a specific, available sub-buffer within the ring buffers of specific channels. When there’s no space left in a sub-buffer, the tracer marks it as consumable and another, available sub-buffer starts receiving the following event records. An LTTng consumer daemon eventually consumes the marked sub-buffer, which returns to the available state.

In an ideal world, sub-buffers are consumed faster than they are filled. In the real world, however, all sub-buffers can be full at some point, leaving no space to record the following events.

By default, LTTng-modules and LTTng-UST are non-blocking tracers: when there’s no available sub-buffer to record an event, it’s acceptable to lose event records when the alternative would be to cause substantial delays in the execution of the instrumented application. LTTng privileges performance over integrity; it aims at perturbing the instrumented application as little as possible in order to make the detection of subtle race conditions and rare interrupt cascades possible.

Since LTTng 2.10, the LTTng user space tracer, LTTng-UST, supports a blocking mode. See the --blocking-timeout of the lttng-enable-channel(1) command to learn how to use the blocking mode.

When it comes to losing event records because there’s no available sub-buffer, or because the blocking timeout of the channel is reached, the event record loss mode of the channel determines what to do. The available event record loss modes are:

Discard mode

Drop the newest event records until a sub-buffer becomes available.

This is the only available mode when you specify a blocking timeout.

With this mode, LTTng increments a count of lost event records when an event record is lost and saves this count to the trace. A trace reader can use the saved discarded event record count of the trace to decide whether or not to perform some analysis even if trace data is known to be missing.

Overwrite mode

Clear the sub-buffer containing the oldest event records and start writing the newest event records there.

This mode is sometimes called flight recorder mode because it’s similar to a flight recorder <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder>: always keep a fixed amount of the latest data. It’s also similar to the roll mode of an oscilloscope.

Since LTTng 2.8, with this mode, LTTng writes to a given sub-buffer its sequence number within its data stream. With a local, network streaming, or live recording session (see the “Recording session modes” section above), a trace reader can use such sequence numbers to report lost packets. A trace reader can use the saved discarded sub-buffer (packet) count of the trace to decide whether or not to perform some analysis even if trace data is known to be missing.

With this mode, LTTng doesn’t write to the trace the exact number of lost event records in the lost sub-buffers.

Which mechanism you should choose depends on your context: prioritize the newest or the oldest event records in the ring buffer?

Beware that, in overwrite mode, the tracer abandons a whole sub-buffer as soon as a there’s no space left for a new event record, whereas in discard mode, the tracer only discards the event record that doesn’t fit.

Set the event record loss mode of a channel with the --discard and --overwrite options of the lttng-enable-channel(1) command.

There are a few ways to decrease your probability of losing event records. The “Sub-buffer size and count” section below shows how to fine-tune the sub-buffer size and count of a channel to virtually stop losing event records, though at the cost of greater memory usage.

Sub-buffer size and count

A channel has one or more ring buffer for each CPU of the target system.

See the “Buffering scheme” section above to learn how many ring buffers of a given channel are dedicated to each CPU depending on its buffering scheme.

Set the size of each sub-buffer the ring buffers of a channel contain with the --subbuf-size option of the lttng-enable-channel(1) command.

Set the number of sub-buffers each ring buffer of a channel contains with the --num-subbuf option of the lttng-enable-channel(1) command.

Note that LTTng switching the current sub-buffer of a ring buffer (marking a full one as consumable and switching to an available one for LTTng to record the next events) introduces noticeable CPU overhead. Knowing this, the following list presents a few practical situations along with how to configure the sub-buffer size and count for them:

High event throughput

In general, prefer large sub-buffers to lower the risk of losing event records.

Having larger sub-buffers also ensures a lower sub-buffer switching frequency (see the “Timers” section below).

The sub-buffer count is only meaningful if you create the channel in overwrite mode (see the “Event record loss mode” section above): in this case, if LTTng overwrites a sub-buffer, then the other sub-buffers are left unaltered.

Low event throughput

In general, prefer smaller sub-buffers since the risk of losing event records is low.

Because LTTng emits events less frequently, the sub-buffer switching frequency should remain low and therefore the overhead of the tracer shouldn’t be a problem.

Low memory system

If your target system has a low memory limit, prefer fewer first, then smaller sub-buffers.

Even if the system is limited in memory, you want to keep the sub-buffers as large as possible to avoid a high sub-buffer switching frequency.

Note that LTTng uses CTF <https://diamon.org/ctf/> as its trace format, which means event record data is very compact. For example, the average LTTng kernel event record weights about 32 bytes. Therefore, a sub-buffer size of 1 MiB is considered large.

The previous scenarios highlight the major trade-off between a few large sub-buffers and more, smaller sub-buffers: sub-buffer switching frequency vs. how many event records are lost in overwrite mode. Assuming a constant event throughput and using the overwrite mode, the two following configurations have the same ring buffer total size:

Two sub-buffers of 4 MiB each

Expect a very low sub-buffer switching frequency, but if LTTng ever needs to overwrite a sub-buffer, half of the event records so far (4 MiB) are definitely lost.

Eight sub-buffers of 1 MiB each

Expect four times the tracer overhead of the configuration above, but if LTTng needs to overwrite a sub-buffer, only the eighth of event records so far (1 MiB) are definitely lost.

In discard mode, the sub-buffer count parameter is pointless: use two sub-buffers and set their size according to your requirements.

Maximum trace file size and count

By default, trace files can grow as large as needed.

Set the maximum size of each trace file that LTTng writes of a given channel with the --tracefile-size option of the lttng-enable-channel(1) command.

When the size of a trace file reaches the fixed maximum size of the channel, LTTng creates another file to contain the next event records. LTTng appends a file count to each trace file name in this case.

If you set the trace file size attribute when you create a channel, the maximum number of trace files that LTTng creates is unlimited by default. To limit them, use the --tracefile-count option of lttng-enable-channel(1). When the number of trace files reaches the fixed maximum count of the channel, LTTng overwrites the oldest trace file. This mechanism is called trace file rotation.
Important

Even if you don’t limit the trace file count, always assume that LTTng manages all the trace files of the recording session.

In other words, there’s no safe way to know if LTTng still holds a given trace file open with the trace file rotation feature.

The only way to obtain an unmanaged, self-contained LTTng trace before you destroy the recording session is with the recording session rotation feature (see the “Recording session rotation” section above), which is available since LTTng 2.11.

Timers

Each channel can have up to three optional timers:

Switch timer

When this timer expires, a sub-buffer switch happens: for each ring buffer of the channel, LTTng marks the current sub-buffer as consumable and switches to an available one to record the next events.

A switch timer is useful to ensure that LTTng consumes and commits trace data to trace files or to a distant relay daemon (lttng-relayd(8)) periodically in case of a low event throughput.

Such a timer is also convenient when you use large sub-buffers (see the “Sub-buffer size and count” section above) to cope with a sporadic high event throughput, even if the throughput is otherwise low.

Set the period of the switch timer of a channel, or disable the timer altogether, with the --switch-timer option of the lttng-enable-channel(1) command.

Read timer

When this timer expires, LTTng checks for full, consumable sub-buffers.

By default, the LTTng tracers use an asynchronous message mechanism to signal a full sub-buffer so that a consumer daemon can consume it.

When such messages must be avoided, for example in real-time applications, use this timer instead.

Set the period of the read timer of a channel, or disable the timer altogether, with the --read-timer option of the lttng-enable-channel(1) command.

Monitor timer

When this timer expires, the consumer daemon samples some channel statistics to evaluate the following trigger conditions:

  1. The consumed buffer size of a given recording session becomes greater than some value.
  2. The buffer usage of a given channel becomes greater than some value.
  3. The buffer usage of a given channel becomes less than some value.

If you disable the monitor timer of a channel C:

  • The consumed buffer size value of the recording session of C could be wrong for trigger condition type 1: the consumed buffer size of C won’t be part of the grand total.
  • The buffer usage trigger conditions (types 2 and 3) for C will never be satisfied.

See the “Trigger” section above to learn more about triggers.

Set the period of the monitor timer of a channel, or disable the timer altogether, with the --monitor-timer option of the lttng-enable-channel(1) command.

Recording Event Rule and Event Record

A recording event rule is a specific type of event rule (see the “Instrumentation Point, Event Rule, and Event” section above) of which the action is to serialize and record the matched event as an event record.

Set the explicit conditions of a recording event rule when you create it with the lttng-enable-event(1) command. A recording event rule also has the following implicit conditions:

You always attach a recording event rule to a channel, which belongs to a recording session, when you create it.

When a recording event rule ER matches an event E, LTTng attempts to serialize and record E to one of the available sub-buffers of the channel to which E is attached.

When multiple matching recording event rules are attached to the same channel, LTTng attempts to serialize and record the matched event once. In the following example, the second recording event rule is redundant when both are enabled:

$ lttng enable-event --userspace hello:world
$ lttng enable-event --userspace hello:world --loglevel=INFO

List the recording event rules of a specific recording session and/or channel with the lttng-list(1) and lttng-status(1) commands.

Disable a recording event rule with the lttng-disable-event(1) command.

As of LTTng 2.13.14, you cannot remove a recording event rule: it exists as long as its recording session exists.

Resources

Thanks

Special thanks to Michel Dagenais and the DORSAL laboratory <http://www.dorsal.polymtl.ca/> at École Polytechnique de Montréal for the LTTng journey.

Also thanks to the Ericsson teams working on tracing which helped us greatly with detailed bug reports and unusual test cases.

See Also

lttng(1), lttng-relayd(8), lttng-sessiond(8)

Referenced By

lttng(1), lttng-add-context(1), lttng-add-trigger(1), lttng-clear(1), lttng-create(1), lttng-destroy(1), lttng-disable-channel(1), lttng-disable-event(1), lttng-disable-rotation(1), lttng-enable-channel(1), lttng-enable-event(1), lttng-enable-rotation(1), lttng-event-rule(7), lttng-list(1), lttng-list-triggers(1), lttng-load(1), lttng-metadata(1), lttng-regenerate(1), lttng-remove-trigger(1), lttng-rotate(1), lttng-save(1), lttng-sessiond(8), lttng-set-session(1), lttng-snapshot(1), lttng-start(1), lttng-status(1), lttng-stop(1), lttng-track(1), lttng-untrack(1).

14 June 2021 LTTng 2.13.14 LTTng Manual