ControlUp vs. Percepio Tracealyzer

An environment where visibility of general performance metrics isn't currently done or is done with a system that is difficult to use (which was our case). An environment where resource allocation decisions need to be made (e.g. how much RAM and CPU to allocate to VM pools). An environment where a troubleshooting tool is needed (e.g. to answer the question, "Why is this person experiencing poor performance right now?")

This is a perfect tool to debug complex bugs in your system, especially in regards to inter-task communication. It is also a great tool for beginners, as the documentation is accessible and the support given by the company is excellent

• The triggers are very flexible and can be configured to alert on things from events in sessions to hardware failures. Script actions are what they sound like. They are scripts that can be created and run on demand or tied to a trigger. One example is that if a hard drive is low on space we have a script to clean up certain things on the drive.
• Script actions are supported by the ControlUp community. Community members can submit scripts that are reviewed by ControlUp and approved. This means more script are added over time.
• ControlUp support and sales support has been great. Our sales engineer is always willing to jump on and help us with configuration issues and standard support is quick to respond and are good at resolving issues.

Incentivized

• Great visualization
• Sometimes awkward views (vertical vs horizontal)

• It seems that there is a gradual transition occurring from one interface (a local program) to another (Web). This creates confusion at times.
• ScoutBees module has a problem with our version of Horizon, so we can't do a login test
• The local program for ControlUp uses a lot of resources
• The training session focus on very large environments, which we aren't. Might be good to offer SMB sessions separately.

• It's not always easy to include/integrate Tracealyzer in the OS build. It would be nice to have a simple install/plug n play method for our target.
• Sometimes, the .bin files from Tracealyzer don't always work and we don't know why

I feel all these products are good and have their strengths but for me it came down to two categories. How easy is it to find issues and cost. It seemed to me that the easiest to use is ControlUp and eG. Price broke down to ControlUp and SysTrack being lower than Goliath and eG.

Incentivized

While we started using uCOSIII for our simpler microcontroller products, we also use QNX on more complex targets (full microprocessors) and it is a much more complex platform offering event tracing, memory tracing, and performance measures that are extremely good and integrated. More importantly these tools are fully integrated without any code changes. Tracealyzer is not integrated as much into uCOSIII like QNX's tools, debugger, etc. But, going thru the manual work of adding Tracealyzer to the build, it did help us get to a shippable product.

• its licensing cost is a bit on high

Incentivized

• Positive: We were able to find some thread priority issues with Tracealyzer.
• Positive: we were able to see timing of events in the sw/hw that we couldn't otherwise see.