User Interface

This section describes the LTTng perspective and its specific views.

LTTng Perspective

The LTTng perspective groups the LTTng specific views, namely:

The views are synchronized i.e. selecting an event, a timestamp, a time range, etc will update the other views accordingly.

The perspective can be opened from the Eclipse Open Perspective dialog (Window > Open Perspective... > Other).

Project View

The project view displays the LTTng projects of the current workspace.

Two folders are always present: Traces and Experiments.

A new LTTng project can be created using the LTTng Project dialog (File > New > Project... or the context menu)

The Traces folder holds the set of traces available for experiments. Traces are imported in the LTTng project using an import wizard triggered by a context menu.

Note: An LTTng trace is actually a composite of multiple channel traces grouped under a folder. It is the folder that has to be imported.

The Experiment folder holds the set of experiments of the project. Experiments are created from the Experiment context menu and are configured from the experiment's context menu.

Events View

The Events View shows the basic trace data in chronological order in a tabular format.

The header displays the current trace (or experiment) name. The table displays the following fields:

The highlighted event is the current event and is synchronized with the other views. If you select another event, the other views will be synchronized accordingly.

Histogram View

The Histogram View displays the trace events distribution with respect to time.

The large histogram, at the bottom, shows the event distribution over the whole trace. The timetamps (sec.nanosec) correspond to the first and the last event in the trace. The selected area corresponds to the current time range window. When clicking in that viewer, the mouse wheel can be used to zoom in/out and update the time range window.

The smaller histogram, on the top right of the view, is a zoom of the current time range window. It also has timestamps on the bottom that correspond to the time range. The scale of the histogram (i.e. the number of events) is displayed on the right.

On the top left, there are three elements of data:

Control Flow View

The Control Flow View is applicable to kernel trace data. It displays the list processes in tabular format, sorted by PID, as well as their state transitions over time in a Gantt chart format.

The tool bar options from left to right are:

The process table displays the following fields:

The graphical part shows the state of the corresponding process a la Gantt: the color represents the process state and the length of the bar represents the time span during which the process was in that state. The header corresponds to a time axis. Note that depending on the scale or zooming factor, some pixels might represent more (in fact many, many more) than just one state.

Here's a list of possible colors and their corresponding process state:

Mouse Control

Resources View

The Resources View is applicable to kernel trace data. It displays the list system resources in tree format, grouped by trace, as well as their state transitions over time in a Gantt chart format.

The tool bar options from left to right are:

The resource tree displays the system resources whose state transitions were collected in the trace.

The graphical part shows the state of the corresponding resources a la Gantt: the color represents the resource state and the length of the bar represents the time span during which the resource was in that state. The header corresponds to a time axis. Note that depending on the scale or zooming factor, some pixels might represent more (in fact many, many more) than just one state.

Here's a list of possible colors and their corresponding process state:

Mouse Control

See Control_Flow_View

Statistics View

The Statistics View displays the various event counters that are collected when analyzing a trace. The data is organized per trace.