In context of computer programming

Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...

, instrumentation refers to an ability to monitor or measure the level of a product's performance, to diagnose errors and to write trace information. Programmers implement instrumentation in the form of code instructions that monitor specific components in a system (for example, instructions may output logging information to appear on screen). When an application contains instrumentation code, it can be managed using a management tool. Instrumentation is necessary to review the performance of the application. Instrumentation approaches can be of two types, source instrumentation and binary instrumentation.

Output

In programming, instrumentation means the ability of an application to incorporate:

• Code tracing
  Tracing (software)
  In software engineering, tracing is a specialized use of logging to record information about a program's execution. This information is typically used by programmers for debugging purposes, and additionally, depending on the type and detail of information contained in a trace log, by experienced...
  
   - receiving informative messages about the execution of an application at run time.
• Debugging
  Debugging
  Debugging is a methodical process of finding and reducing the number of bugs, or defects, in a computer program or a piece of electronic hardware, thus making it behave as expected. Debugging tends to be harder when various subsystems are tightly coupled, as changes in one may cause bugs to emerge...
  
   and (structured) exception handling
  Exception handling
  Exception handling is a programming language construct or computer hardware mechanism designed to handle the occurrence of exceptions, special conditions that change the normal flow of program execution....
  
   - tracking down and fixing programming errors in an application under development.
• Performance counters - components that allow the tracking of the performance of the application.
• Computer data logging
  Computer data logging
  Computer data logging is the process of recording events, with an automated computer program, in a certain scope in order to provide an audit trail that can be used to understand the activity of the system and to diagnose problems....
  
   - components that allow the logging and tracking of major events in the execution of the application.

See also

• Instruction set simulator
  Instruction Set Simulator
  An instruction set simulator is a simulation model, usually coded in a high-level programming language, which mimics the behavior of a mainframe or microprocessor by "reading" instructions and maintaining internal variables which represent the processor's registers.Instruction simulation is a...
  
   - simulation of all instructions at machine code level to provide instrumentation
• Runtime intelligence
  Runtime intelligence
  -Introduction:The term runtime intelligence refers to technologies, managed services and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of application usage levels, patterns and practices...
  
   - technologies, managed services and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of application usage levels, patterns and practices
• Software performance analysis - techniques to monitor code performance, including instrumentation
• Hardware performance counter
  Hardware performance counter
  In computers, hardware performance counters, or hardware counters are a set of special-purpose registers built into modern microprocessors to store the counts of hardware-related activities within computer systems...