T55 Dec 24, 2025 2 min read

Diagnostic dump

Structured output captured during failure or termination, such as stack traces, core dumps, thread dumps, or runtime state snapshots.

Definition

A diagnostic dump is output captured during failure or termination that helps explain what the process was doing.

Depending on the system, a diagnostic dump might include:

  • stack traces
  • a core dump
  • a thread dump
  • runtime state summaries

Where you see it

Diagnostic dumps often appear on:

  • crashes (SIGSEGV, SIGABRT)
  • explicit requests to dump state (for example, SIGQUIT in some runtimes)

The exact content is runtime-specific.