DX Spectrum vs. Percepio Tracealyzer

As I said before, not only for Spectrum, but for any monitoring tool, you need to know what is critical in your environment and think about how exactly you should monitor and treat it. If you have done that, everything will work just fine.

• Well Suited - Networking Monitoring
• Less Appropriate - When you need to customize some monitoring and to update the version

Incentivized

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

• Polling and traps can be configured to take heartbeats at specified intervals and notify on an event in real-time, respectively.
• Topology of devices gives a high-level overview of network architecture.
• Discovery of devices is simple and secure with the use of community strings.
• Details can be added per device or alarm type for actions to be taken to make troubleshooting easier.

Incentivized

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

• NOC
• Data Center/Telecom

Incentivized

• 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

Other tools I have used are more server/application-centric. CA Spectrum seems to work effectively and efficiently for network devices. Notification delays can be set to grant grace periods in case of network blips or false positives, which occur ALL the time. Other monitoring tools send event notifications immediately and would clear instantly, which while on-call can wake a technician for no reason.

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.

• Proactive monitoring for networking
• To many times to plan an update

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.