For a thorough investigation of software performance issues, a history of execution is essential, with the recorded values of variables and context fields you choose, and with as little influence as possible on the instrumented application. This is where tracing comes in handy. Tracing is a technique used to understand what goes on in a running software system. The piece of software used for tracing is called a tracer, which is conceptually similar to a tape recorder. When recording, specific instrumentation points placed in the software source code generate events that are saved on a giant tape: a trace file. You can record user application and operating system events at the same time, opening the possibility of resolving a wide range of problems that would otherwise be extremely challenging.

• LTTng an open source tracing framework for Linux
• Eclipse Trace Compass is an open source application to solve performance and reliability issues by reading and analyzing traces and logs of a system.
• magic-trace collects and displays high-resolution traces of what a process is doing
  • GitHub
  • Jane Street Tech Blog / Magic-trace: Diagnosing tricky performance issues easily with Intel Processor Trace

Wikipedia

• Tracing (software) involves a specialized use of logging to record information about a program's execution.
• Stack trace (backtrace, traceback) is a report of the active stack frames at a certain point in time during the execution of a program.

Conferences

• Tracing Summit single-track conference on the topic of tracing