What is NetLogger?

Anyone who has ever tried to debug or do performance analysis of complex distributed applications knows that it can be a very difficult task. Problems may be in many various software components, hardware components, networks, OS’s, etc.

NetLogger is designed to make this easier. NetLogger is both a methodology for analyzing distributed systems, and a set of tools to help implement the methodology. In fact, you can use the NetLogger methodology without using any of the LBNL provided tools.

This methodology is described in more detail in the NetLogger Overview technical report (Note: the section on the the details of the message format and the client API are a bit out of date, but the concepts have not changed. The most recent NetLogger paper is from the Grid 2003 conference.