Getting Started with Percepio Tracealyzer

Kernel Tracing Guides

Once Tracealyzer has been installed, the next step is to add tracing in your target system. Follow the guide below that matches your software platform. Most integrations are based on Percepio TraceRecorder, unless other solutions are mentioned.

• Bare Metal
• FreeRTOS (standard)
• FreeRTOS ESP-IDF (ESP32)
• Linux (using LTTng)
• ThreadX
• PX5 RTOS
• Wind River VxWorks (using wvLib)
• Zephyr

Also make sure to read the User Manual included with Tracealyzer (see the “Help” menu). In particular, the section Creating and Loading Traces.
If your platform is not included, please consider making a custom integration based on the Tracealyzer SDK.

User Instrumentation Guides

Software-based tracing also lets you add ultra-fast logging both for temporary debugging purposes and for Continuous Observability where instrumentation is added proactively and remains in the system. Adding user-defined events is key to effective trace debugging.

• User Event Logging – For debug logging. Similar to printf, but better and faster.
• State Machine Tracing – Trace and visualize any kind of state variables in your application.
• Runnable Tracing (function-level profiling)
• See also Tracealyzer Tips and Tricks

Guides for specific development tools

• Using Tracealyzer with VS Code
• Using Tracealyzer with Microchip MPLAB X IDE
• Using Tracealyzer with Segger J-Link RTT streaming
• Using Tracealyzer with STM32CubeIDE, snapshots and STLINK streaming support
• Using Tracealyzer with GDB or Eclipse (snapshots)
• Using Tracealyzer with Renesas e2 studio (RZ/T2 example)
• Using Tracealyzer with IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm
• Using Tracealyzer with Arm Keil µVision (ITM streaming)
• Using Tracealyzer with Lauterbach on Arm Cortex-M
• Other Application Notes

Further Examples of Tracealyzer Usage

• Demos on Github – Documented code examples of Tracealyzer and Percepio Detect using FreeRTOS
• Tracealyzer Hands On – blog series on use-cases and features
• Tracealyzer on Zephyr Examples – Common Multithreading Problems and Their Fixes (from AC6).
• TzLinux – blog series on Linux tracing
• Setting custom names for kernel objects – like RTOS queues, mutexes etc. in Percepio TraceRecorder

If you have any questions, contact us here. We love to hear from you and appreciate your feedback.

Make sure to visit the RTOS Debug Portal for blogs and white papers about RTOS-based firmware design and how Tracealyzer can assist your development.