Radek Szymczyszyn

Gabor Olah will show you how to use a unique feature of the Erlang VM: Tracing Erlang and Elixir programs in a distributed network. Tracing allows us to understand a running system from the perspective of the VM. We will discover how to utilise this feature to x-ray everything from a single node to a distributed application. We will discuss how to incorporate tracing into a development workflow as well as safe tracing in production. We also explore other possibilities of debugging of the BEAM. We will demonstrate the techniques for both Erlang and Elixir.

---

Expertise: Intermediate

Target audience: Software Developers & Support Engineers

Duration: 4 hours

Prerequisites: Practical experience of Erlang or Elixir

Objectives:

• Understanding of the low level mechanism of tracing
• Understanding of where tracing fits into the development flow
• Understanding tracing in a single noe
• Understanding tracing in a distributed cluster

Course Outline

The course covers the topics of tracing in the BEAM virtual machine. It is applicable for both Erlang and Elixir as most libraries are the same. The course covers the following tracing libraries:

• Built-in tracer
• dbg
• redbug/rexbug

The course gives practical advice for tracing on a live system let it be a single node or a distributed cluster. We will discuss how tracing can complement logging and monitoring.

ABOUT THE TRAINER

Radek Szymczyszyn been programming since he was 15 and doesn’t intend to stop. For the last 9 years he’s been working professionally with BEAM technologies, both remotely and on-site, assisting companies from startups to telecommunication giants build and scale their systems. His main tools are Erlang and XMPP, and he’s quite keen on making the Erlang ecosystem a good place to be in, by participating in the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation Documentation WG.