Diagnostics

With over 20 years experience of portable protocol software, Data Connection has developed a very rich set of diagnostics tools to help us, our customers and our customers' customers quickly identify errors, reproduce them if necessary and provide fixes. There are five main diagnostics included and each can be enabled both at compile and run time.

Message tracing is an extremely powerful tool, described in more detail below. It can trace every event at each component boundary.
Internal trace provides detailed logging of all processing, and allows source filtering of the tracing.
FSM tracing identifies each FSM state / event transition.
There are multiple levels of asserts used liberally in the code.
Problem determination logging provides details of major system events that would typically be integrated with a customer's event log tools.

A build with all diagnostics enabled provides an immense amount of diagnostic information. Production builds typically utilize less tracing for efficiency, but will still usually include the key asserts, event logging and message tracing. The sample trace output below illustrates the power of the message trace.

Sample trace output

The link below shows example output from our message tracing tool. This allows a real-time capture of data flowing into and out of a DCL protocol system, and between components. The data has been captured and post-processed off-line to provide a graphical output and a detailed dump. This tool is extremely flexible and can be

compiled in or out
turned on and off at run-time
dumped to a real file, RAM file or over telnet or FTP
filtered at source to reduce the load on the target
filtered when post-processing to simplify the output.

This tool helps DCL engineers solve many problems without adding specific diagnostics, including through reproduction of the problem from the logs. Even in production systems, this tool allows our customers' field engineers to gather diagnostics.

Please click on the following links to view examples of the message tracing output for our products. The upper screen shows the graphical flow of data. Each message in this screen is broken out in detail on the lower screen. Click on a message in the upper screen to see its detail in the lower screen.