Application Tracing

So OpenCover is as feature complete as I care to take it at the moment, I may do this one feature involving Windows Store applications should I have a need for it, and I decided to not continue with OpenMutate as I can't really find a need for it other than an exploratory investigation into reJIT.

I do have one more itch to scratch when it comes to profilers and that is application tracing and this may allow me to play with other technologies which I'll list later. This itch started a few months back, perhaps 6+ months ago, when I was trying to integrate some commercial tracing applications to an application I was working on and they both died horribly and I started to look for alternatives and found nothing available. Now I could have started the project then but I decided to pester both vendors until they fixed the problem which they eventually did (within a week or two of each other or so it seemed to me) and I integrated one of the solutions and moved on... but the itch never went away.

So what am I thinking... well a profiler (obviously) with 32/64 support (again given) and making obscene abuse of the COR_PRF_MONITOR_ENTERLEAVE functionality. The problem here is I don't really know what people will want to track (hey that is why there are companies that do this thing with BAs and such like to decide on this) so in the first instance I'll go at tracing everything (which will probably be very slow) and go from there.

This leads to the next problem, data, lots of it, lots and lots of it, and that data is going to need a home but a home I can then use to create reports at some point. For this I am thinking asynchronous, initially a queue and potentially an event source like data store like EventStore or NEventStore. The advantage of an event source would allow the ability to regenerate the views once we know what they are, perhaps something along the lines of Splunk or SplunkStorm would come into play.

So a name... always the hardest part but thankfully we have the internet and online dictionaries so I've gone with OpenDiscover.