General trace and log analysis patterns allow the application of uniform diagnostics and anomaly detection across diverse software environments. It includes troubleshooting, debugging, describing, and explaining problems and incidents on various operating systems and platforms. It is also helpful in recording network traces, malware, general data, narratives, and text and image analysis (space-like narratology). This course, organized as a pattern language dictionary and cross-referenced with classification, explains and teaches more than 200 traces and log analysis patterns.

A Guide to Learning Software Trace and Log Analysis Patterns

## Trace partition
Here, we introduce the partitioning of a trace in a narratological software into head, prologue, core, epilogue, and tail segments. **Trace partition** is helpful for comparative software trace analysis. Let’s suppose that a trace started just before the reproduction steps, or a start marker was injected and finished just after the last repro steps or after an end marker was injected. Then its core trace messages would be surrounded by prologue and epilogue statements. What is before and after is not necessary for analysis and are usually distractions for an analyst. They are shown as gray areas on the following picture where the left trace is for a working (non-working) scenario, and the right trace is for a non-working (working) scenario:

# Trace partition
Here, we introduce the partitioning of a trace in a narratological software into head, prologue, core, epilogue, and tail segments. **Trace partition** is helpful for comparative software trace analysis. Let’s suppose that a trace started just before the reproduction steps, or a start marker was injected and finished just after the last repro steps or after an end marker was injected. Then its core trace messages would be surrounded by prologue and epilogue statements. What is before and after is not necessary for analysis and are usually distractions for an analyst. They are shown as gray areas on the following picture where the left trace is for a working (non-working) scenario, and the right trace is for a non-working (working) scenario:

This lesson introduces the following analysis patterns: trace partition, trace shape, trace summary, truncated trace, and visibility limit.

Getting Started

Activity

Block and Data

Error and Large Scale

Message 1

Message 2

Trace as a Whole

Trace Set

Vocabulary, Memory, Code and Text

Conclusion

Index

Partition, Shape, Summary, Truncated, Visibility

Trace partition