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Event Tracer (ET)
User's Guide
Version 1.5.1

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Chapters

- Introduction
  - Top of chapter
  - Scope and Purpose
  - Prerequisites
  - About This Manual
  - Where to Find More Information
- Tutorial
  - Top of chapter
  - Visualizing Message Sequence Charts
  - Four Modules
  - The Event Tracer Interface
  - The Collector and Viewer
  - The Selector
  - How To Put It Together
- Description
  - Top of chapter
  - Overview
  - Filters and dictionary
  - Trace clients
  - Global tracing
  - Viewer window
  - Configuration
  - Contents viewer window
- Advanced examples
  - Top of chapter
  - A simulated Mnesia transaction
  - Some convenient functions used in the Mnesia transaction example
  - Erlang trace of a real Mnesia transaction
  - Erlang trace of Megaco startup

# 1 Introduction

The Event Tracer (ET) uses the built-in trace mechanism in Erlang and provides tools for collection and graphical viewing of trace data.

The viewed trace data is normally collected from Erlang trace ports or files.

### 1.1 Scope and Purpose

This manual describes the Event Tracer (ET) application, as a component of the Erlang/Open Telecom Platform development environment. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the Erlang Development Environment, which is described in a separate User's Guide.

### 1.2 Prerequisites

The following prerequisites is required for understanding the material in the Event Tracer (ET) User's Guide:

- familiarity with the Erlang system and Erlang programming in general and the especially the art of Erlang tracing.

The application requires Erlang/OTP release R13BB or later. If you use the old GS based GUI it does suffice with R7B.

### 1.3 About This Manual

In addition to this introductory chapter, the Event Tracers User's Guide contains the following chapters:

- Chapter 2: "Tutorial" provides a walk-through of the various parts of the application. The tutorial is based on Jayson Vantuyl's article http://souja.net/2009/04/making-sense-of-erlangs-event-tracer.html.

- Chapter 3: "Description" describes the architecture and typical usage of the application.

- Chapter 4: "Advanced examples" gives some usage examples

### 1.4 Where to Find More Information

Refer to the following documentation for more information about Event Tracer (ET) and about the Erlang/OTP development system:

- the Reference Manual of the Event Tracer (ET).

- documentation of basic tracing in erlang:trace/4 and erlang:trace_pattern/3 and then the utilities derived from these: dbg, observer, invisio and et.

- Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong; ISBN: 978-1-93435-600-5