DTrace

DTrace (Dynamic Tracing) Community

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris™ Operating Environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.

The Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide describes how to use DTrace to observe, debug, and tune system behavior. The DTrace guide also includes a complete reference for bundled DTrace observability tools and the D programming language.

For Users

Dynamically enable and manage thousands of probes.
Dynamically associate predicates and actions with probes.
Dynamically manage trace buffers and probe overhead.
Examine trace data from a live system or from a system crash dump.

For Solaris Developers

Implement new trace data providers that plug into DTrace.
Implement new trace data providers that plug into DTrace.
Implement trace data consumers that provide data display.
Implement tools that configure DTrace probes.

Information Resources

Getting Started

See Chapter 1 of the DTrace Guide
Bryan Cantrill's original Newsgroup Posting
DTrace Topics Intro on SolarisInternals.com
Many links are on the DTrace BigAdmin System Administration Portal
How to get started Guide on Brendan Gregg's DTrace Tools page
James Dickens What is DTrace
DTrace FAQ on genunix.org

Discussions

Join the discussion on the OpenSolaris DTrace Jive forum or Mailman interface. To subscribe, send an empty email to dtrace-discuss dash subscribe at opensolaris dot org
For reference only, see the DTrace forum on forums.sun.com
Find Q&As in the XPerts Session

Scripts

Download the DTraceToolkit
Brendan Gregg's DTrace Tools
Richard McDougall's DTrace Scripts

Documentation

DTrace Guide PDF from oracle.com
DTrace Guide from wikis.sun.com
DTrace Topics from SolarisInternals.com
DTrace on Wikipedia

Books

DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD
Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris

Technical Papers

USENIX DTrace Paper

Blogs

Examples

A few worked DTrace Examples
Jay Danielsen's DTrace Case Study
Dragan Cvetkovic's Example of USDT in SAX [PDF]

Related Projects

DTrace Network Providers
DTrace Providers for Various Shells
OpenSolaris Project: Mozilla DTrace: DTrace Mozilla and JavaScript providers
OpenSolaris Project: Chime Visualization Tool for DTrace

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Created by on 2009/10/26 11:40

Last modified by Brendan Gregg on 2011/02/22 09:56

DTrace

DTrace (Dynamic Tracing) Community

Information Resources

Collectives

Community Group dtrace Pages