Write Once, Instrument Anywhere: Portable, Sandboxed Tooling with WebAssembly Components

Abstract

Monitoring and debugging deployed software is crucial for scalability, performance, and robustness. Cross-cutting concerns are pervasive across software ecosystems, yet engineers must address them with a fragmented toolbox. While high-level frameworks exist to offer application-level types and semantics, they often lock a solution into specific languages, runtimes, or hardware architectures. Portability often forces engineers to choose lower-level instrumentation mechanisms. For example, in-language frameworks can trace a request across processes, but multi-language contexts require instrumentation at the boundary, for example using eBPF. While these frameworks provide powerful capabilities, they often result in 1) a tradeoff between application-level types or low-level bytes and packets, 2) non-composable domain-specific tools, 3) feature fragmentation across frameworks, and 4) tools that often run with unrestricted access to the program and its environment. We address these problems with Splicer, a WebAssembly component interposition framework that 1) provides semantically rich application-level types, 2) enables pluggable tooling with powerful capabilities, 3) reduces ecosystem fragmentation through porting across languages and hardware, and 4) confines each tool to a sandbox with explicitly granted permissions. We evaluate Splicer on a suite of benchmarks demonstrating the pluggability of non-trivial tooling written in multiple source languages and their performance.