Sun Application Monitoring Software Tool: Introduction to Dtrace. Dtrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing facility that is built into Solaris and can be used by administrators and developers to examine the behavior of both user programs and of the operating system itself. With Dtrace you can explore your system to understand how it works, track down performance problems across many layers of software, or locate the cause of aberrant behavior. It is safe to use on production systems and does not require restarting either the system or applications. Learn more about Sun’s advanced operating system and application monitoring software.

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Introduction to DTrace

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing facility that is built into Solaris and can be used by administrators and developers to examine the behavior of both user programs and of the operating system itself. With DTrace you can explore your system to understand how it works, track down performance problems across many layers of software, or locate the cause of aberrant behavior. It is safe to use on production systems and does not require restarting either the system or applications.

DTrace dynamically modifies the operating system kernel and user processes to record data at locations of interest, called probes. A probe is a location or activity to which DTrace can bind a request to perform a set of actions, like recording a stack trace, a timestamp, or the argument to a function. Probes are like programmable sensors scattered all over your Solaris system in interesting places. DTrace probes come from a set of kernel modules called providers,each of which performs a particular kind of instrumentation to create probes.

DTrace includes a new scripting language called D which is designed specifically for dynamic tracing. With D it is easy to write scripts that dynamically turn on probes, collect the information, and process it. D scripts make it convenient for Users to share their knowledge and troubleshooting methods with others.