Canonical Announces ETrace As New Linux Application Tracing For Performance/Debugging

Canonical has announced ETrace as a new application tracing tool designed for debugging and performance profiling of Snap packages but can also be used with any Linux binary applications.

Their new ETrace tool is written in the Go programming language and leverages ptrace for performance and debug analysis. Current functionality of ETrace allows monitoring the time it takes an application until its window is displayed, the files accessed during the duration of the program, and other common profiling/debug features.

ETrace has various features integrated around Snap such as being able to automatically clear user data, reinstall Snaps, and more. We'll see how much momentum ETrace ends up getting in the Linux development ecosystem outside of the Snaps world.

ETrace is available via the Snap Store though is also available via Canonical's GitHub repository under the GPLv3 license. ETrace has been in development by Canonical engineers over the past year. The code has been seemingly public for a few months now but only making today its formal announcement.

More details on ETrace and its current abilities via the Ubuntu Blog.