Introspection and analysis

Understanding what is happening inside your robot’s software is essential for debugging, optimization, and system maintenance. This article summarizes the ROS tools and guidance available for introspection and analysis, including ways to inspect runtime behavior, monitor data, and analyze system performance.

Area: introspection, analysis, tools | Content type: about | Level: beginner, intermediate, expert

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• Introspection with command line tools
  • Usage
  • Example
  • ROS 2 Daemon: Background Discovery Service
    • Running the Daemon in the Foreground
  • Implementation
• Publishing messages using YAML files - tutorial
  • Overview
  • Prerequisites
  • Tasks
  • Next steps
• Enabling topic statistics (C++) - tutorial
  • Background
  • Prerequisites
  • Tasks
    • 1 Write the subscriber node with statistics enabled
    • 2 Build and run
    • 3 Observe published statistic data
  • Summary
  • Related content
• Using ros2_tracing to trace and analyze an application - tutorial
  • Overview
  • Prerequisites
  • Installing and building
  • Tracing
    • Step 1: Trace
    • Step 2: Run Application
    • Step 3: Validate Trace
  • Analysis
  • Conclusion
• Logging
  • Using log statements in code
    • Basic logging
    • Logging only the first time
    • Logging all but the first time
    • Logging throttled
    • Logging throttled all but the first time
  • Logging demo
  • Logging directory configuration
  • Logger level configuration: programmatically
  • Logger level configuration: externally
    • Using the logger config component
  • Logger level configuration: command line
    • Console output formatting
    • Console output colorizing
    • Default stream for console output
    • Line buffered console output
  • Setting the log file name prefix
• Configuring service introspection - tutorial
  • Overview
  • Installing the demo
  • Introspection Configuration State
  • Introspection demo
  • Related content
• Examining network traffic - tutorial
  • Overview
  • Prerequisites
  • Run the demo
    • Install tcpdump
    • Start the talker and listener
    • Display unencrypted discovery packets
    • Display unencrypted data packets
    • Enable encryption
    • Display encrypted discovery packets
    • Display encrypted data packets