Distributed real-time systems (DRTSs) are used in a wide range of applications, including command and control systems, flight control systems, robotics, patient monitoring systems, and many others. This volume provides an overview of various systematic approaches to the testing and debugging of DRTSs—tasks that typically consume 50% to 70% of a new system's development costs. Distributed Real-Time Systems covers both the theoretical and practical issues involved in monitoring, visualization, and analysis methodology for verifying and debugging DRTSs. It describes in detail how to overcome timing verification difficulties and improve system performance and reliability. Complete with many carefully worked-out examples, as well as dozens of illustrations, this timely and accessible work Explains real-world debugging approaches—proposed or tested—using static analysis or dynamic analysis with or without monitoring Features step-by-step instructions for design implementation in hardware and software, detecting timing errors and their causes, graphical debugging methods, and more Covers numerous analytical techniques, including timed Petri nets, temporal logic, timed state transition systems, timed process algebra, and synchronous programming languages Makes distributed systems analysis accessible through examples such as a distributed telephone switching system and a fault-tolerant distributed system Reviews many relevant professional papers and current research work The joint product of four leaders in the field, Distributed Real-Time Systems is an important text and reference for electrical and software engineers, graduate students, and anyone involved in computer and data processing technology.

Most applications today are distributed in some fashion. Monitoring the health and performance of these distributed architectures requires a new approach. Enter distributed tracing, a method of profiling and monitoring applications—especially those that use microservice architectures. There’s just one problem: distributed tracing can be hard. But it doesn’t have to be. With this practical guide, you’ll learn what distributed tracing is and how to use it to understand the performance and operation of your software. Key players at Lightstep walk you through instrumenting your code for tracing, collecting the data that your instrumentation produces, and turning it into useful, operational insights. If you want to start implementing distributed tracing, this book tells you what you need to know. You’ll learn: The pieces of a distributed tracing deployment: Instrumentation, data collection, and delivering value Best practices for instrumentation (the methods for generating trace data from your service) How to deal with or avoid overhead, costs, and sampling How to work with spans (the building blocks of request-based distributed traces) and choose span characteristics that lead to valuable traces Where distributed tracing is headed in the future

The first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject rather than a collection of papers. The author is a recognized authority in the field as well as an outstanding teacher lauded for his ability to convey these concepts clearly to many different audiences. A handy reference for practitioners in the field.

BY H. KOPETZ A real-time computer system must provide the intended service in two di mensions: the functional (value) dimension and the temporal dimension. The verification of a real-time system implementation is thus necessarily more com plex than the verification of a non-real-time system which has to be checked in the value dimension only. Since the formal verification techniques of temporal properties have not yet matured to the point where these techniques can be used in practical system development, systematic design and testing are the only alternatives for the development of dependable real-time systems. At present, up to and more than fifty percent of the development eff'ort of complex real-time computer systems is spent on testing. The test activities are thus a significant cost element in any real-time system project. The attack on this cost element has to proceed from two fronts: the design for testability and the development of a systematic test methodology supported by an appropriate tool set. This book covers both of these topics.

The design and development of digital computer software for distributed concurrent programming environments has increased significantly in the past few years. The presence of remote processors and concurrency greatly complicates the creation, analysis, testing, and debugging of all software produced for these environments. It appears that few tools developed for sequential environments are adequate for debugging software programs in a distributed concurrent environment. The distributed concurrent environment also presents the need for special debugging tools that were not needed for sequential environments. This research will present a new model for debugging programs in a distributed concurrent programming environment. This new model was used to design, develop, and implement an integrated, cooperating set of concurrent debugging tools. The new debugging model and tool set were used in a distributed Concurrent C development environment running under the UNIX® operating system and connected by an Ethernet local area network. Actual results obtained from using the new debugging scheme and integrated debugging tool set to detect, locate, and correct software faults in distributed Concurrent C programs are also presented.