Automatic software instrumentation is usually done at the machine level or is targeted at specific program behavior for use with a particular monitoring application. The paper describes CCI, an automatic software instrumentation tool for ANSI C designed to serve a broad range of program execution monitors. CCI supports high level instrumentation for both application-specific behavior as well as standard libraries and data types. The event generation mechanism is defined by the execution monitor which uses CCI, providing flexibility for different monitors' execution models. Code explosion and the runtime cost of instrumentation are reduced by declarative configuration facilities that allow the monitor to select specific events to be instrumented. Higher level events can be defined by combining lower level events with information obtained from semantic analysis of the instrumented program.

The Alamo monitor architecture reduces the difficulty of writing dynamic analysis tools such as special-purpose profilers, bug-detectors, and visualizations.