Logging and diagnostics are an important aspect of any embedded project.
In many cases, using an interactive debugger is not possible or practical. Hardware state can change in a few milliseconds. After a program stops on a breakpoint, a developer does not have enough time to analyze it. Collecting detailed log data and using tools for their analysis and visualization is a better approach for high-performance, multithreaded, time-sensitive embedded systems.
Since in most cases resources are limited, developers often have to make tradeoffs. On the one hand, they need to collect as much data as possible to identify the root cause of failure—whether it is the software or hardware, the status of the hardware components at the time of the failure, and the accurate timing of the hardware and software events handled by the system. On the other hand...
