structured output to tcp socket

[windelbouwman]

Hi!

This tracing tool is cool! Is there an option to route the events as timestamp/message pairs in either json / cbor format into a tcp/ip pipe? I would like this to be able to visualize them in a trace visualizer.

For example, my own visualization toolie (https://github.com/windelbouwman/lognplot) can ingest (timestamp,message) pairs over a tcp link. For this to work, I would write a python script that takes the strace output, and forwards it in the proper format.

[windelbouwman]

Follow up question: what would it take to add a different output format to strace? I looked into the code, and a lot of code boils down to tprintf-ing to the currently active tcb. Would it be worth it to support different output formats? For example, JSON, XML and these kind of thing? Maybe in a row oriented fashion, such that on each logline an event is emitted?

[SamB]

Hmm. Well, I guessd you could use --output='|nc host.example.com 1337' along with a structured output flag, once #169 gets implemented. See https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/netcat-openbsd/nc.1.en.html for details on nc ("net cat").

Or for this particular application, I guess you would just stick your python script in there and it could convert the structured format (once it exists) to the form your server is expecting.

[windelbouwman]

Yup, this would work. A machine parseble structured output in any shape would be great, together with nc this would work.

[rchateauneu]

For example, JSON, XML and these kind of thing?

Outputting RDF triples would be great, because strace logs could be fed into a graph database, for example to investigate with SPARQL.