Available Kernel Probes (tnf_probes)

The SunOS kernel probes supply information approximately at the level of statistics-based Solaris performance monitoring tools such as vmstat, iostat, and sar. However, they provide more detail -- each probe records a high-resolution timestamp, a thread (LWP, thread, and process identifiers), a CPU, and individual probes identify the system resources (such as disks, files, CPUs, and so on) associated with an event.

You can use kernel tracing, along with user-level tracing, to correlate the events recorded by your application or library probes with the events recorded by the kernel probes. Thus you can get a detailed view of how your code uses kernel services, and how the demands your application places on system resources interact with the demands placed by other clients.

The text below summarizes the SunOS kernel probes; see the tnf_probes(4) manual page for detailed information on the event record fields.