Getting System Metrics Using POSIX Tracing Services

One of the possible applications of the POSIX tracing services is to obtain system metrics from trace streams. A trace stream stores a sequence of events generated by the system during the application execution. By interpreting this sequence of events, interesting system metrics can be obtained. Unfortunately, the interpretation of these sequences of events may be very difficult for a programmer who does not know the system implementation in detail. In order to solve this problem we present an interface which is implemented on top of the POSIX tracing services. This interface allows the programmer to obtain predefined system metrics and user-defined metrics from trace streams without it being necessary for programmers to know the system implementation.