Research topic
This topic covers visual interfaces and visual encodings for navigating execution traces and understanding system behavior. The collection includes multiscale timelines, state views, dependency and interaction graphs, critical paths, labels, and visual support for performance diagnosis.
Related search terms: execution trace visualization · large trace visualization · trace navigation
7 papers in this topic, ordered newest first. The detailed paper records contain the evidence-grounded methods, tools, datasets, findings, and citation guidance.
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
2021 · 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications (ISNCC)
The paper provides a graphical state-machine modeling tool that generates trace analyses and integrates them into Trace Compass, reducing the need to hand-code state providers or XML analyses.
Keywords: state-machine traces · trace indexing · special-purpose database · Gantt chart · XY view
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 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
2014 · 2014 IEEE 27th Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE)
The paper presents multiscale trace navigation that links raw kernel events to system-call, synthetic, and fault/alert abstractions in a zoomable timeline.
Keywords: large trace data · multiscale navigation · zoomable timeline · semantic zoom · physical zoom
2013 · Runtime Verification 2013 (RV 2013)
The paper introduces a disk-backed state-history model that incrementally converts trace events into queryable state intervals, enabling scalable timestamp/state queries and visualization without replaying the entire trace.
Keywords: system states · trace queries · trace visualization · interval data · tree-based storage
2013 · 2013 IEEE 26th Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE)
The paper develops a multilevel trace-label placement algorithm that preserves readable, semantically meaningful labels while users zoom and pan across dense execution-trace views.
Keywords: execution trace events · label placement · trace visualization · overlap avoidance · event labels