Chime Visualization Tool for DTrace

Chime

Chime is a graphical tool for visualizing DTrace aggregations.  It provides an alternative to similar CLI-based tools (such as intrstat) that is more visually appealing and potentially more useful.  In particular, its ability to sort columns arbitrarily and display data over time offers convenience and better visibility of system and application behavior.  

An important feature of Chime is the ability to add new traces without re-compiling. A trace is simply an XML file that describes a DTrace program and how to display traced data.  Individual traces can include macro arguments and placeholder prompts that function like script options, making traces more flexible. Placeholders also provide a way for DTrace program values to be substituted behind the scenes, enabling the user of Chime to see more detail about selected items of interest by choosing from a list of drilldown options without having to know about DTrace. The resulting (modified) programs are displayable, making the tool educational as an added benefit.  Chime can function as a toolkit of canned traces, but also leverages some of the dynamic potential of DTrace to answer unanticipated questions prompted by the data display.  Chime even provides some of the ad hoc capability of dtrace(1M) by generating traces directly from the command line using -n or -s to specify a program string or a program file just as you would with the dtrace command:  

% /opt/OSOL0chime/bin/chime -ktn 'sysinfo:::readch { @bytes[execname] = sum(arg0); }' -T "Bytes Read"  

The above command is from Brendan Gregg's DTrace One Liners, modified to include options for sparklines, a total row, and a title. Generated traces can be saved (-w option), edited in a wizard, documented, and grouped into categories, making them easy to find and run later.  Chime now includes a category with many scripts from the DTraceToolkit.

You can get the latest version of Chime here.  Please send questions, comments, and bug reports to chime dash discuss at opensolaris dot org (subscribe here).  Feel free to share Chime traces as attached .xml files.  If you specify some explanatory text in the longDescription property, it will appear in the Chime window when the trace is selected.