Quickstart: Trace conversion

This quickstart demonstrates how Perfetto traces can be converted into other trace formats using the traceconv tool.

Prerequisites

• A host running Linux or MacOS
• A Perfetto protobuf trace file

The supported output formats are:

• text - protobuf text format: a text based representation of protos
• json - Chrome JSON format: the format used by chrome://tracing
• systrace: the ftrace text format used by Android systrace
• profile (heap profiler only): pprof-like format. This is only valid for traces with native heap profiler dumps.

Setup

curl -LO https://get.perfetto.dev/traceconv
chmod +x traceconv
./traceconv [text|json|systrace|profile] [input proto file] [output file]

Converting to systrace text format

./traceconv systrace [input proto file] [output systrace file]

Converting to Chrome Tracing JSON format

./traceconv json [input proto file] [output json file]

Opening in the legacy systrace UI

If you just want to open a Perfetto trace with the legacy (Catapult) trace viewer, you can just navigate to ui.perfetto.dev, and use the the “Open with legacy UI” link. This runs traceconv within the browser using WebAssembly and passes the converted trace seamlessly to chrome://tracing.