Instruments

A small Ruby C extension that allows you to send signals to Instruments.app to indicate interesting points or regions.

For more info about Instruments and the ‘Points of Interest’ instrument, see these slides.

Note that this uses the kdebug_signpost API, which is only available since macOS 10.12.

Example

Consider the following process:

require "instruments"

p Process.pid # => 14895

# A single event
Instruments.signpost(42, 1, 2, 3, Instruments::COLORS[:light_green])

# A region
Instruments.signpost(42, 1, 2, 3, Instruments::COLORS[:light_red]) do
  sleep 3
end

When attaching Instruments.app using the ‘Points of Interest’ instrument you’d get the following:

Note that the color coding only works when the instrument is configured to do so (File -> Recording Options…):