Android tracing, monitoring and debugging

This article provides useful information to start using Android^™ tracing, monitoring and debugging environments.

1. Specific Linux trace and debug tools

In Android^™ various Linux trace and debug tools are available. To get the global picture you can refer to Linux tracing, monitoring and debugging page.

2. Android tools

2.1. Application debugging

To debug your Android application you can use Android Studio to do so. Please read the official documentation about Android Studio.

2.2. adeb

adeb (also known as androdeb) provides a powerful Linux shell environment where one can run popular and mainstream Linux tracing, compiling, editing and other development tools on an existing Android device. All the commands typically available on a modern Linux system are supported in adeb.

It consist in putting a Debian distribution into the Android system itself to execute more debug commands.

For more information refer to the ADEB page.

2.3. logcat

The Android logging system provides a mechanism for collecting and viewing system debug output. Logs from various applications and portions of the system are collected in a series of circular buffers, which then can be viewed and filtered by the logcat command. You can use logcat from an ADB shell to view the log messages.

For more information refer to the Android developer site.

2.4. perfetto

Perfetto is an open-source project for performance instrumentation and tracing of Android platforms and user-space apps.

For more information refer to the perfetto page.

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