Lecturer: Gad J. Meir, Idag, Ltd.

Instrumentation gives you the ability to use operating system infrastructure services to receive, in real time, detailed information about how your program is functioning.

You get the ability to embed in your program road signs, signals and trace capabilities that can be dynamically and selectively activated and stopped as needed in the customers environment.

You can control your instrumentation without recompiling, using tools that are integral part of the operating system.

These abilities allow you to receive an exact picture of the operation of your program in real-time and allow you to more easily locate, problems in the runtime environment. The operating system Instrumentation infrastructure allow for the collection of data even if the application is distributed over several computers.

Instrumentation provides a bridge that connects your application to your customer’s production  and enterprise environment, and to the operations and management tools that are customarily used in these types of environments (and in computer centers with large numbers of computers).

Integrating the Instrumentation mechanisms in the design phase of a program has minimal effect on the development and coding time, but reduces considerably the time dedicated to locating mistakes and analyzing problems in the development, debugging, installation and usage phases.

The following topics will be covered in this lecture:

• ETW -Event tracing for windows.
• Performance Counters.
• WMI - Windows Management Instrumentation.
• Event Logs.
• WER – Windows Error Reporting
• PTD - production Time Debugging.