For distributed real-time systems, adequate profiling tools are exceedingly rare. The sheer variety and low-level nature of these systems impede the adoption of standard, general-purpose tools for performance analysis and visualization. Although much research has been devoted to profiling parallel clusters and supercomputers, the literature virtually ignores the real-time domain. Correspondingly, a handful of commercial tools is available for profiling realtime software, but they invariably make a single-node assumption and are unable to cope with distributed environments.

We examine the state of performance analysis and discuss why profilers are conspicuously absent in the field of distributed real-time systems. We then explore how developers of these systems could benefit from graphical profiling tools with automatic instrumentation and data collection. Toward that end, we demonstrate the prototype of a performance visualization tool called "Bacara," the second addition to our suite of tools for Visual Analysis of Distributed Real-time systems, or VADR.