Strange, the impression I got from MS devs on Twitter is that this is something they have been working on for a while that they just finished and premiered at a CPP conference.
The core technology was born out of a group in MS research long ago. Moving from research code to production is highly non-trivial. I first heard how time travel debugging was implemented before i knew about Facebook. I suspect SSDs are part of what made this more practical as it used to simply saturate disk IO, even on specialized systems. With a pci express SSD this becomes much more pragmatic then when the initial idea was implemented.
If the overhead doesn’t prevent capturing a trace reproducing the symptom, there is zero reason you cannot find the root cause. But that actually pales in comparison with treating the execution traces as data.
Yes I believe TTT, or iDNA as it was known, was first released internally around 15 years ago. Or maybe that was just the Nirvana process instrumentation framework it is based on. Either way it's a long time.
A modified version of the tracer is used sometimes to help with support cases, but this is the first public release of the WinDbg replay bit as well.
If the overhead doesn’t prevent capturing a trace reproducing the symptom, there is zero reason you cannot find the root cause. But that actually pales in comparison with treating the execution traces as data.