History

From NetLogger

NetLogger has been in existence, in one form or another, since 1994. Since that time it has been rewritten and renamed, so that the body of software now labeled NetLogger has little or no relation to the software distributed in the early years of research and development. Until October 2004, the current version of NetLogger was called NetLogger 'Lite'. This was in contrast to the previously developed toolkit known as NetLogger, which was then renamed NetLogger 'Full'.

The Full NetLogger instrumentation library is very powerful and contains a number of features such as backup destinations, auto-reconnect, remote activation, a binary format, etc. Experience showed that most of these features were not needed for the most common use-cases, so we developed a new, lightweight, easy to use version of the NetLogger instrumentation library called, initially, NetLogger-lite. This is the version of the toolkit documented here. The Full NetLogger is still available (tho unsupported). The very fast binary format, described in our HPDC 2002 paper, is only supported by the full library, so programs which generate more than 1000 events/second will still want to use the full library.

The NetLogger 3.0 release, and previous releases called "nllite", introduced a new ASCII format that is a slight variation on the ASCII format called ULM that was used by previous NetLogger releases. The binary format is not produced, and for the most part not consumed, by the NetLogger 3.0 or later.