Getting Started with DTrace

Last update: Mar 28, 2007

1. Getting Started

• Ruby && DTrace by crafterm

• 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

• Joyentâs 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

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3. DTrace on Linux?

• Dtrace port to Linux(http://www.crisp.demon.co.uk/blog/index.html) http://www.crisp.demon.co.uk/tools.html

• Interesting discussion on DTrace versus SystemTap and the state of the SystemTap at Linux Kernel Summit 2008

Theres a good article on dtrace and SystemTap and the Linux traceing toolkit here: http://lwn.net/Articles/298685. DTrace for linux gets a mention.

http://blogs.sun.com/barts/entry/putting_user_defined_dtrace_probe

This is DTrace for Linux: no kernel source is needed (except compilation headers). No patches are made to the kernel source. Its a drop in driver. Once the driver is loaded, you can run dtrace. I am not even asking Linus or any other kernel maintainer to ‘please add dtrace’ to the kernel. I dont care - - thats just me ! Maybe, one day, when I have documented ‘proc’, and ‘fcterm’, and decided I want to enjoy the politics of kernel maintenance, I might ask.

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4. The Best DTrace Blogs

• Brendan Gregg’s blog

• Adam Leventhal’s Weblog

• Joyent’s Weblog

• The Good, the Blog & the Ugly

• The Observation Deck

5. 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

6. 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.

7. Tracing The Entire Stack

• DTracing Apache

• 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

• User-Level DTrace Probes in PostgreSQL, 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

8. What About Linux?

• SystemTap

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