Columbo

Simulation can provide almost arbitrary deep visibility into what a simulated system does without affecting the simulated systems behaviour at all. Additionally do most simulators provide the capabilities to write detailed log files. The goal of Columbo will be to add library support to SimBricks that allows users to easily write small programs to obtain Low-Level End-to-End System Traces of SimBricks simulations by harnessing the log files that are written by the simulators involved in a simulation. To achieve this the log files are combined and converted into already existing formats known from distributed tracing: Events, Spans, Traces. This will be useful tooling for people using SimBricks as it will help to easily answer questions like what was the average end-to-end latency within a simulation and how was this latency distributed across individual components or why did RPC X take Z ms longer than RPC Y. In more detail are the individual log files parsed to obtain Events that will be packed together to Event-Spans for each simulator respectively. These event spans will then be causally connected to each other to form a distributed trace. To benefit from this, existing tools from the distributed tracing community (like Jaeger) are used to visualize and query the resulting traces.