1. A method for observing and measuring in real-time an event inside a device, the method comprising: generating control bits from a command instruction by a command unit, the command instruction being issued by a host processor external to the device, the command instruction including at least an opcode and an operand specifier; and pipelining internally generated signals through a pipeline datapath to produce a measurement of the event based on the control bits, the internally generated signals being representative of the event.