Traces in Solana

Question

I'm looking to create a data pipeline that gets traces (both value transfers and contract executions like on the EVM) but, I can't find the equivalent to it on Solana's VM.

What is the equivalent to EVM traces in Solana's VM?

Appreciate any help in this direction.

Cheers!

Update:

• The smallest unit of execution is an Instruction and is within a Transaction.
• The Transaction object has metadata called InnerInstruction which has a set of instructions within a transaction.
• However, I believe this can be disabled during a transaction (so not transparent)

So while I made some progress, I'm still in a quandary on how to get all lowest-level traces of transactions when Inner Instructions can be disabled.

Answer 1

I'm not very familiar with EVM traces but it seems very similar to emitting events in Solana.

We use events to log messages (anything you would do with msg!()). But they are not human readable as they are base64 encoded. Also msg!() with string formatting is relatively expensive for compute units

Here is an example

pub fn initialize(_ctx: Context<Initialize>) -> Result<()> {
        emit!(MyEvent {
            data: 5,
            label: "hello".to_string(),
        });
        Ok(())
    }

#[event]
pub struct MyEvent {
    pub data: u64,
    #[index]
    pub label: String,
}

And in the client side, you listen for events

listener = program.addEventListener("MyEvent", (event, slot) => {
    console.log([event, slot]);

    //      [ { data: 5,
    //        label: "hello".to_string(), } ,
    //       123131313 ]

});