Research topic
This topic covers system-level execution tracing across operating-system, runtime, application, and distributed-service layers. The papers use traces to reconstruct execution states, correlate requests with resource behavior, identify bottlenecks, and support performance or reliability analysis. Tool and version details are kept on the individual records so the topic page remains a map of the research area rather than a generic tool list.
Related search terms: system-level tracing · execution tracing · system trace analysis
40 papers in this topic, ordered newest first. The detailed paper records contain the evidence-grounded methods, tools, datasets, findings, and citation guidance.
2026 · ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE)
B-Perf reconstructs execution, memory, and messaging behavior from Linux kernel-level traces and infers performance-antipattern indicators without requiring application source access or intrusive instrumentation.
Keywords: performance antipatterns · black-box detection · system-level execution traces · LTTng · Trace Compass
2026 · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
CARE combines distributed traces and profiling metrics with graph- and spectrum-based analysis to localize performance root causes in microservices.
Keywords: distributed traces · profiling metrics · context-aware RCA · microservice diagnosis · TrainTicket
2026 · Journal of Systems and Software
DTraComp is an open-source Eclipse Trace Compass framework that compares groups of distributed requests and attributes span time to user-space, kernel, thread-state, and system-call evidence.
Keywords: DTraComp · distributed trace comparison · OpenTracing · LTTng · LTTng-UST
2026 · Journal of Systems and Software
LMAT combines multi-task language models for kernel-event and event-duration prediction with online change detection, lightweight error-vector root-cause analysis, and adaptive tracing control.
Keywords: adaptive tracing · LTTng · kernel events · system-call sequences · event-duration modeling
2026 · ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) Companion
TraceSynth generates novel structured kernel-trace windows with a Transformer diffusion model and repairs generated events against invariants mined from real LTTng traces.
Keywords: kernel traces · trace generation · diffusion models · constraint-guided generation · LTTng
2025 · Authorea preprint
The preprint combines communication-related kernel/system-call events with distributed traces to detect communication performance anti-patterns in microservices.
Keywords: communication anti-patterns · DeathStarBench · LTTng · Trace Compass · Jaeger
2025 · IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
The paper reconstructs missing system-call events in execution traces with diffusion and structured state-space generative models.
Keywords: execution trace reconstruction · trace imputation · diffusion models · DiffWave · SSSDS4
2025 · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
HybridRCA combines critical-path-aware span analysis with targeted kernel metrics to reduce production trace volume while preserving root-cause localization evidence.
Keywords: critical path · hybrid tracing · production microservices · LTTng · OpenTracing
2025 · 2025 IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Advances in Software and COmputiNg (CASCON)
SynthLogAI benchmarks statistical, sequence, transformer, and prompt-based generative models for producing synthetic Linux logs while measuring fidelity, downstream utility, and privacy.
Keywords: synthetic Linux logs · generative AI · log generation · log evaluation · CASCON 2025
2024 · Journal of Systems and Software
The paper releases a reusable Linux kernel-event and system-call artifact with controlled application workloads, injected resource noise, and analysis scenarios for software performance engineering.
Keywords: LTTng · Linux kernel events · system calls · kernel tracepoints · Elasticsearch
2024 · 2024 IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Advances in Software and COmputiNg (CASCON)
The paper detects and localizes performance noise by aligning passive kernel-event evidence with the life cycle of CPU, disk, and network requests rather than treating resource utilization as an undifferentiated aggregate.
Keywords: kernel event monitoring · resource life cycle · noise detection · CPU requests · disk requests
2024 · 2024 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER)
The paper proposes an adaptive tracing loop that combines language-model prediction of kernel-event sequences and event durations with change detection and root-cause analysis, so detailed tracing is activated only around significant behavior shifts.
Keywords: adaptive tracing · LTTng · kernel events · system-call sequences · event-duration modeling
2023 · IEEE International Conference on Big Data
AltOOM combines early memory-pressure forecasting with selective process-level profiling to identify the process most responsible for an impending out-of-memory event.
Keywords: out-of-memory · OOM diagnosis · data-driven RCA · resource analysis · memory pressure forecasting
2023 · 2023 IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)
EMD-SCS combines sequence prediction of system calls with sonification so that partial execution prefixes can support early malware detection and an interpretable auditory alert.
Keywords: malware detection · system-call sequences · sonification · Hamming distance · detection rate
2023 · 2023 IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Research (SERA)
The paper presents a multi-level adaptive tracing workflow that uses lightweight stress detection and performance evidence to change the application/kernel instrumentation scope during an investigation.
Keywords: adaptive execution tracing · time-series trends · multi-level tracing · kernel tracing · performance analysis
2022 · Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
The paper combines model-based quantitative constraints with user-space and kernel execution traces to automatically identify likely causes of real-time and multicore constraint violations.
Keywords: model-based constraints · execution tracing · user-space traces · kernel traces · LTTng
2022 · IEEE Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)
N-Lane Bridge extends One-Lane Bridge analysis to active-resource bottlenecks and uses LTTng system-level traces to distinguish application-caused congestion from external interference.
Keywords: N-Lane Bridge · One-Lane Bridge · performance antipatterns · system-level execution tracing · LTTng
2022 · 30th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)
The framework combines critical-path extraction, coarse anomaly checks, OPTICS execution clustering, and MUSCLE multiple sequence alignment to localize performance differences in system-level traces.
Keywords: sequence alignment · MUSCLE · OPTICS · critical path · system-level traces
2022 · 2022 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E)
This poster proposes operating-system-aware antipattern detection that uses system-level traces and scalability trends to expose resource blocking that aggregate CPU utilization can hide.
Keywords: operating-system support · application performance analysis · performance instrumentation · IC2E 2022 · poster paper
2021 · IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)
The paper combines system-level dependency graphs with automated outlier detection to localize likely causes of latency anomalies.
Keywords: latency outliers · system-level traces · dependency graphs · density-based models · z-score
2021 · International Journal of Parallel Programming
The paper automatically builds an approximate workflow model and adaptive quantitative constraints from user-space and kernel execution traces, reducing manual model construction for real-time and multicore diagnosis.
Keywords: model-based constraints · execution tracing · multi-core systems · real-time applications · constraint generation
2021 · Electronics
The paper combines Jaeger distributed traces with LTTng kernel and user-space events and extends critical-path analysis from threads to distributed requests so request latency can be related to low-level scheduling and resource behavior.
Keywords: distributed tracing · kernel tracing · cloud applications · cross-layer performance analysis · LTTng
2021 · IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom)
The paper characterizes container workloads from host-level LTTng traces by selecting important threads and clustering execution-state behavior without instrumenting the containers internally.
Keywords: container workloads · host tracing · LTTng · pid_ns · tid
2021 · Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
The paper correlates LTTng traces from user space through kernel, storage, network, and multiple hosts in a disk-backed state model, enabling top-down diagnosis of distributed request latency.
Keywords: distributed requests · multilevel trace analysis · LTTng · Apache · PHP
2021 · Sensors
The paper presents a modular client-server architecture for large-trace storage, analysis, and visualization inside an integrated development environment.
Keywords: distributed architecture · Trace Compass · TraceScape · LTTng 2.10.3 · Trace Analysis Server Protocol
2021 · 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)
The paper presents a low-intrusion heap monitor that records allocation call stacks and uses persistent heap-growth filtering plus trace correlation to identify likely memory-leak roots.
Keywords: heap monitoring · memory leaks · root-cause analysis · memory management · BigData 2021
2021 · 2021 IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon)
The paper combines LTTng system-call monitoring with recurrent and Transformer-style models for malware and anomalous system-behavior detection.
Keywords: malware detection · system-call analysis · LTTng · Trace Compass · LSTM
2021 · 2021 IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon)
The work bridges kernel-level hardware-counter sampling and user-space interpreter state so execution-path profiling can attribute performance evidence to interpreted code.
Keywords: execution paths · hardware performance counters · critical-path profiling · CPython · PyPMU
2020 · IEEE Internet of Things, GreenCom, CPSCom and SmartData
The paper correlates LTTng traces across OpenStack services, QEMU/KVM, network components, and host kernels to diagnose cloud-platform performance problems.
Keywords: cloud platforms · multi-level execution tracing · LTTng · LTTng-UST · OpenStack Nova
2020 · IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW)
The paper extends critical-path analysis across kernel and user-space lock events so contention from futexes, spinlocks, semaphores, and other synchronization mechanisms can be diagnosed without recompiling the application.
Keywords: lock contention · multi-level execution traces · LTTng 2.10 · Trace Compass 4 · LD_PRELOAD
2019 · Journal of Systems Architecture
The paper redesigns GDB dynamic tracing around LTTng-UST and scalable trace views so multi-threaded CPU/GPU debugging remains usable on heterogeneous many-core systems.
Keywords: heterogeneous systems · dynamic tracing · large-scale debugging · debugging efficiency · GDB
2019 · Journal of Hardware and Systems Security
The paper combines execution-trace and virtual-machine metrics with machine learning to detect EDoS behavior and restrict resource expansion to apparently normal VMs.
Keywords: Economic Denial of Sustainability · EDoS · DDoS · cloud computing · execution trace analysis
2018 · IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE)
The paper correlates OpenStack Nova, QEMU/KVM, and host/guest kernel evidence to diagnose live-migration behavior across cloud-system layers.
Keywords: cloud tracing · high-level tracing · low-level tracing · cross-layer observability · OpenStack Nova
2018 · IEEE Systems Conference
The paper correlates PHP user-space events with LTTng kernel events in a unified multilevel model to explain high-latency web requests.
Keywords: high latency · dynamic analysis · multilevel analysis · latency causes · LTTng
2017 · Software Quality Journal
The framework lets analysts define stateful trace analyses declaratively, using a generic state model and XML specifications that can drive storage, filtering, and visualization across trace formats.
Keywords: declarative trace analysis · stateful analysis · execution traces · LTTng · ETW
2017 · Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
The paper designs and evaluates hardware-assisted alternatives to LTTng-UST for software-event and execution-path tracing, including STM/ETB, ETM/ETB, and a modified Perf/BTS path.
Keywords: hardware-assisted tracing · software events · event collection · trace overhead · ARM CoreSight
2017 · Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
The survey provides a taxonomy and requirements-oriented comparison of techniques for collecting, abstracting, analyzing, visualizing, and navigating large execution traces.
Keywords: trace navigation · multi-scale analysis · trace visualization · content abstraction · metric abstraction
2016 · IEEE Future Internet of Things and Cloud Workshops (FiCloudW)
The paper fuses synchronized host and virtual-machine kernel traces into a Fused Virtual Machine view that exposes how VM threads, virtual CPUs, hypervisor transitions, and physical CPUs interact.
Keywords: virtualized systems · kernel tracing · multilayer analysis · virtualization overhead · LTTng
2015 · IEEE BigData Congress
The paper provides a declarative XML/state-machine approach for flexible filtering and synthetic-event generation over large kernel traces.
Keywords: execution trace filtering · LTTng 2.4.0 · Trace Compass · finite-state machine · declarative analysis
2012 · Advances in Software Engineering
The paper introduces a stateful trace-abstraction method that converts low-level kernel events into semantic and synthetic events using modeled resource state and finite-state patterns.
Keywords: stateful trace abstraction · synthetic events · semantic events · modeled state · finite-state machine