Show Notes
episode 37: dial9: from black box to insight in Tokio.
In this episode of Netstack.fm, Glen talks with Jess Izen and Russell Cohen from Amazon about Dial9, a new tool for understanding what’s happening inside Rust and Tokio applications. They explain how it captures events from different layers of your system and puts them into a single timeline, making it much easier to debug tricky performance issues and unexpected behavior.
They also share how Dial9 came out of real debugging challenges at Amazon, where engineers often had to rely on complex, low level tools. The goal with Dial9 is to make those kinds of insights more accessible, so developers can diagnose problems faster and with less guesswork, while the tool continues to evolve with new features and improvements.
Learn more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTlThfOcslM — TokioConf 2026 - Lightning Talk: dial9: WTF is Tokio actually doing? by Russell Cohen https://tokio.rs/blog/2026-03-18-dial9 — Introducing dial9: a flight recorder for Tokio https://github.com/dial9-rs/dial9-tokio-telemetry — source code (Tokio Telemetry you can run in production) https://github.com/dial9-rs/dial9-tokio-telemetry/blob/main/dial9-trace-format/SPEC.md — trace format spec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr0RYMu57kU — demo walkthrough (slightly outdated) https://github.com/dial9-rs/dial9-tokio-telemetry/blob/main/dial9-tokio-telemetry/examples/production_use.rs — example
Rama
If you like this podcast you might also like our modular network framework in Rust: https://ramaproxy.org
Chapters
00:00 Intro 02:01 Meet Russell and Jess 05:27 The Mission of the Rust Team at Amazon 11:47 Integration with OpenTelemetry and Tracing 13:49 The Evolution of Dial 9 17:17 Comparing Dial 9 with Existing Tools 20:07 Continue exploring history and development and UX of Dial9 33:47 Building Self-Serve Solutions 36:22 perf sched 38:30 Task Dumps 41:17 Dial 9: almost a free lunch 43:00 Cross-Platform Considerations for Dial 9 46:20 Future Features and Improvements for Dial 9 50:20 Dial 9 usage today 54:31 Considerations before using Dial 9 01:03:05 Getting Started with Dial 9 01:05:30 Outro
Netstack.FM
More information: https://netstack.fm/#episode-37 Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/29EetaSYCD Reach out to us: [email protected]
Music for this episode was composed by Dj Mailbox. Listen to his music at https://on.soundcloud.com/4MRyPSNj8FZoVGpytj
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