IDNDUG Jul 17, 2013

Wednesday, July 17, 2013 from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM (IDT)

Microsoft instrumentation infrastructures and tools

Description:

Incorporating proper instrumentation in the application, significantly increases the ability of the support team to maintain the application in the field, as well as to identify and to solve problems quickly. In addition, the support team, QA, Testers and even the end user can collect and send relevant precise technical feedback to the development team, information that will enable the developers to locate and eliminate bugs faster and better.

The windows operating system contain a very sophisticated and robust instrumentation infrastructure. The instrumentation management and collecting tools are part of the operating system and does not require any installation. The Instrumentation Framework is widely used by Microsoft itself in its own operating system services and in its desktop and server products.

The instrumentation APIs are fully documented and freely available. Any software developer that wants to instrument it’s software can use them. Unfortunately most developers don’t use them or even worse, build their own instrumentation infrastructure or use open source or third party frameworks, that are less performing.

In this two part talk we will cover Instrumentation infrastructures build into the Windows operating system, demo the built in managing and collection tools (and tools included in the SDK and WDK), present the relevant APIs and show code examples. We will cover methodology and give some historical background and guidelines based on field experience.

We will start with the ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) infrastructure and tools, and depends on time, we will try to cover other instrumentation infrastructures like Event log, Performance counters, WMI, WER and more.

On Wednesday 17th Huly 2013

17:30 - 18:00   Assembly 
18:00 - 19:15   Microsoft Instrumentation infrastructure and tools Part 1

19:15 - 19:30   Break 

19:30 – 20:30  Microsoft Instrumentation infrastructure and tools Part 2

About the speaker: 

Gad Meir has worked in the computer industry since 1975. His main expertise is troubleshooting production and end user environments for the root cause of failures. Since the root cause of failures is either architecture, process and (rarely) abuse of technology, Gad uses MSF (Microsoft Solution Framework) principles to identify faults in development or deployment processes/procedures. Gad's main task is to pre-empt problems in the project-planning phase. Unfortunately, he is usually summoned at the last minute, either when the system crashes or when the project is about to die or for post mortem analysis of failed projects. Dealing with failed projects is directly connected with Gad's second specialty which is analyzing dumps, blue screens and other low-level plumbing tasks.