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Eclipse Trace Compass

Eclipse Trace Compass is an open-source application (observability and performance analysis) for viewing, analyzing, and correlating traces and logs from Linux, Java, and other systems.

  • Trace-based analysis and visualization for complex software systems (observability, performance engineering)
  • Support for multiple trace formats, including Linux kernel traces and user-space traces (systems observability)
  • Timeline, statistics, and state system views for performance and behavior analysis (performance analysis, debugging)
  • Extensible plug-in architecture built on the Eclipse platform (extensibility, tooling platform)
  • Integration into Eclipse Immutable Deployment Environment (IDE) workflows for developers and system engineers (developer tooling)

More About Eclipse Trace Compass

Eclipse Trace Compass is an application (observability and performance analysis) that focuses on reading, processing, and visualizing trace and log data from complex software systems, including Linux-based environments and Java applications. It is developed under the Eclipse Foundation and is available as an Eclipse-based tool that can be installed as a standalone application or as plug-ins within the Eclipse IDE. The project is oriented toward users who need to understand execution behavior, timing relationships, and resource usage across large, concurrent, or distributed workloads.

The core capability of Eclipse Trace Compass is trace analysis (observability), where it ingests traces from multiple sources and formats, such as Linux kernel traces produced with common tracing frameworks and user-space traces from various runtimes. Once imported, traces can be explored through timelines, graphs, and tabular statistics that show events over time, Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage, interrupt activity, system calls, and other low-level or application-level events. This enables users to examine cause-and-effect relationships between components and identify performance bottlenecks, latency sources, or anomalous execution patterns.

Trace Compass provides several analysis views and models (performance analysis), including time graphs, XY charts, state system views, and statistics summaries. The state system mechanism builds higher-level state information from raw events, such as thread states, resource ownership, or protocol phases, which can then be visualized and queried. Users can correlate multiple traces within the same session to investigate interactions across different subsystems or nodes, improving understanding of distributed or multi-layer execution flows.

The tool is built on the Eclipse platform (tooling platform), so it uses the Eclipse plug-in model for extensibility. Organizations and developers can create custom analyses, views, or trace readers to support proprietary formats or domain-specific workflows. This extensibility enables integration with internal instrumentation, custom logging frameworks, or specialized runtime environments while keeping a consistent user interface and analysis paradigm. Being part of the Eclipse ecosystem, Trace Compass can be combined with other Eclipse-based tools for development, debugging, and testing.

In enterprise environments, Eclipse Trace Compass is used by system engineers, performance specialists, and developers (enterprise operations and engineering) who work with Linux, real-time, embedded, or high-throughput systems. It supports workflows such as Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of performance regressions, investigation of concurrency issues, and validation of system behavior under load. The project fits into observability and performance engineering categories, focusing on deep trace-level insight rather than metric dashboards. Its ability to correlate traces from different layers and to build higher-level state models makes it applicable to scenarios where detailed temporal analysis is required for system correctness and tuning.