Organization and management of distributed execution event histories for real-time debugging

The author discusses development of a real-time monitoring environment to provide distributed programmers with valuable information about an executing program as events occur. Of particular importance is design and implementation of analysis software which accepts user requests, queries and receives event histories from the instrumentation system, and provides sufficient program abstractions to support graphical displays and metric evaluations of execution progress. The analysis software has been named DECIPHER. The DECIPHER distributed debugging system is described. The primary obstacle involves organizing and managing voluminous event histories in real-time. Both efficient organization and data management are crucial to effectiveness and accuracy