[lttng-dev] String format based events

[eeppeliteloop@gmail.com (Philippe Proulx)]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Jeffrey Chen <cpthk at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I have a question while reading the lttng documentation. Could anyone answer
> me? Thanks a lot.
>
> It looks like lttng events are all key-value pairs. Like { my_val1 = 10,
> my_val2 = "OK" }. Does lttng supports regular string format based events,
> like Windows ETW. I want a human readable sentences in the event like "My
> CPU usage is 50 , my memory usage is 100". Of course, I know I could
> manually construct the string myself and pass the result in one string down
> to lttng. But, the idea is that, string format is slow. So, Windows ETW does
> the string formatting only when you read the logs.
> For example, if I want to write many "My CPU usage is {0} , my memory usage
> is {1}" to log. Windows ETW does not write this whole string to log. It only
> writes the 2 variable values of this trace to the log, and construct back
> the original string when you are reading the logs.

Hello Jeffrey!

We (EfficiOS) are currently working on such a feature, which involves
changes to all the following projects:

  * CTF (trace format used by LTTng): allow custom user attributes to
    be assigned to types and events in the trace metadata (this is where
    the format string would go)
  * LTTng-UST: add a macro to be used in tracepoint providers to
    assign a format string to a specific event
  * Babeltrace: upgrade the ctf-text plugin so that it takes into
    account the format string of an event, if available, to print it in a
    custom way

We could also think about a tool, or a Babeltrace input plugin perhaps,
which converts the Windows ETW format to CTF; we would need to
parse the format strings and convert them to our own syntax.

The format string syntax we're intending to use is Python's format()
one [1], or at least a subset of its features. It is very flexible and
allows to name fields, modify them, and place them where you
want, e.g.:

"My field is {field}, which is {field:x} in hex, and also: {other_field}"

Replacement fields may also be empty to be position-based:

"My field is {}, and also: {}"

(you would need exactly two fields here).

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#formatstrings

Phil

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