Getting Started with DTrace

Last update: Mar 28, 2007

1. Getting Started

• DTrace Intro, on Solaris Internals

• DTrace Intro, by Brendan Gregg

• Exploring Leopard with DTrace, by Greg Miller

• DTraceToolkit in MacOS X, by Brendan Gregg

• DTrace Topics Quick Wins, on Solaris Internals

2. DTracing Ruby

• Joyent’s DTrace site

• Classic Gotcha when using DTrace on Leopard, on ruby-talk

• DTrace in Leopard with Ruby probes, by Paul Ingles

• DTrace user-land components in Leopard

3. The Best DTrace Blogs

• Brendan Gregg’s blog

• Adam Leventhal’s Weblog

• Joyent’s Weblog

• The Good, the Blog & the Ugly

• The Observation Deck

4. The Bible

• DTrace Quick Reference Guide, by Ifeyinwa Okoye and John Stearns

• Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide (pdf)

• DTrace User Guide (pdf)

• SolarisInternals DTrace Topics

• Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems

• BigAdmin DTrace

5. DTrace Tools

• DTrace Toolkit makes DTrace easier to use, by Jim Laurent

• Richard McDougall’s DTrace Scripts

• OpenSolaris DTrace Toolkit, wonderful collection of useful documented scripts developed by the OpenSolaris DTrace community.

• Apple Instrument, wonderful visualization tool, Apple style!

• Apple Instrument User Guide

• DExplorer, DExplorer automatically runs a collection of DTrace scripts to examine many areas of the system, and places the output in a meaningful directory structure that is tar’d and gzip’d.

• Chime, graphical tool for visualizing DTrace aggregations.

6. Tracing The Entire Stack

• Using DTrace to Capture Statement Execution Times in MySQL, by Tim Cook

• Using DTrace on MySQL, by Joyent

• Postgres Dynamic Tracing

• PostgreSQL DTrace Users Guide, by Robert Lor

• DTrace with PostgreSQL on OSX, by Lee Packham

• DTrace Mozilla - JavaScript Tracing Framework Landed, by John Rice

• DTrace meets Javascript, by Brendan Gregg

• Shell provider, by Alan Hargreaves

• DTrace Provider for NFSv4

• DTrace Network Providers

• Erlang DTrace

7. What About Linux?

• SystemTap

• DTrace Knockoffs, by Adam Leventhal – sharing his thoughts on how the DTrace community feels about SystemTap.