The project was originated by Mathieu Desnoyers with an initial release in 2005.

LTTng uses the Tracepoint instrumentation of the Linux kernel, as well as various other information sources such as kprobes, and the Perf performance monitoring counters.

Major users include Google, IBM, Autodesk, Siemens, Nokia, Sony and Ericsson.

Once collected, multiple solutions exist to process and visualize LTTng trace data (kernel and userspace) such as the open-source LTTV viewer, Eclipse Trace Compass[3] or commercial tools such as Mentor Graphics' Sourcery Analyzer and Percepio Tracealyzer.

[4] LTTng-modules, LTTng-UST, LTTng-tools and Babeltrace are actively developed by an open community.