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Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide Oracle Solaris 11 Information Library |
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Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide Oracle Solaris 11 Information Library |
The Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide describes how to use DTrace. It also describes the DTrace providers in detail. Most of the information present in this document is generic to all releases of the Oracle Solaris operating system.
Note -
This Oracle Solaris release supports systems that use the SPARC and x86 families of processor architectures: UltraSPARC, SPARC64, AMD64, Pentium, and Xeon EM64T. The supported systems appear in the Oracle Solaris 10 Hardware Compatibility List at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19253-01/816-2419/index.html. This document cites any implementation differences between the platform types.
In this document the term x86 refers to 64–bit and 32–bit systems manufactured using processors compatible with the AMD64 or Intel Xeon/Pentium product families. For supported systems, see the Oracle Solaris 10 Hardware Compatibility List.
This Oracle Solaris release supports systems that use the SPARC and x86 families of processor architectures: UltraSPARC, SPARC64, AMD64, Pentium, and Xeon EM64T. The supported systems appear in the Oracle Solaris 10 Hardware Compatibility List at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19253-01/816-2419/index.html. This document cites any implementation differences between the platform types.
In this document the term x86 refers to 64–bit and 32–bit systems manufactured using processors compatible with the AMD64 or Intel Xeon/Pentium product families. For supported systems, see the Oracle Solaris 10 Hardware Compatibility List.
This book is for any one who needs to understand the behavior of your system. DTrace allows you to explore your system to understand how it works, track down performance problems across many layers of software, or locate the cause of aberrant behavior.
DTrace allows all Oracle Solaris users to:
Dynamically enable and manage thousands of probes
Dynamically associate logical predicates and actions with probes
Dynamically manage trace buffers and buffer policies
Display and examine trace data from the live system or a crash dump
DTrace allows Oracle Solaris developers and administrators to:
Implement custom scripts that use the DTrace facility
Implement layered tools that use DTrace to retrieve trace data
This guide will teach you everything you need to know about using DTrace. Basic familiarity with a programming language such as C or a scripting language such as awk(1) or perl(1) will help you learn DTrace and the D programming language faster, but you need not be an expert in any of these areas.
The DTrace User Guide contains the following topics:
Chapter 1, About DTrace, provides an overview of DTrace.
Chapter 2, D Programming Language, explains the D programming language.
Chapter 3, Aggregations, explains how to aggregate the data provided by the probes.
Chapter 4, Actions and Subroutines, describes the actions and subroutines supported by DTrace.
Chapter 5, Buffers and Buffering, describes the data buffering and management service provided by DTrace.
Chapter 6, Output Formatting, explains how to format the output of D programs.
Chapter 7, Speculative Tracing, describes the speculative tracing facility provided by DTrace.
Chapter 8, dtrace(1M) Utility, describes the options supported by the dtrace command.
Chapter 9, Scripting, explains how to create interpreter files by using D programs. The interpreter files are similar to shell scripts that you can install as reusable interactive DTrace tools.
Chapter 10, Options and Tunables, explains the options and tuning parameters supported by the dtrace command.
Chapter 11, Providers, describes the providers supported by DTrace.
Chapter 12, User Process Tracing, explains how to use DTrace to understand the behavior of user processes.
Chapter 13, Statically Defined Tracing for User Applications, explains how to develop customized probes.
Chapter 14, Security, describes the security aspects of DTrace.
Chapter 15, Anonymous Tracing, describes anonymous tracing.
Chapter 16, Postmortem Tracing, explains how to extract and process the in-kernel data after a system failure.
Chapter 17, Performance Considerations, explains the performance considerations that you need to understand when using DTrace.
Chapter 18, Stability, describes the concepts related to stability in the context of D programs.
Chapter 19, Translators, describes the translators supported in D programs.
Chapter 20, Versioning, explains the concepts related to versioning in the context of DTrace.
These books and papers are recommended and related to the tasks that you need to perform with DTrace:
Kernighan, Brian W. and Ritchie, Dennis M. The C Programming Language. Prentice Hall, 1988. ISBN 0–13–110370–9
Vahalia, Uresh. UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers. Prentice Hall, 1996. ISBN 0-13-101908-2
Mauro, Jim and McDougall, Richard. Oracle Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Components. Sun Microsystems Press, 2001. ISBN 0-13-022496-0
Oracle customers have access to electronic support through My Oracle Support. For information, visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=info or visit http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=trs if you are hearing impaired.
The following table describes the typographic conventions that are used in this book.
Table P-1 Typographic Conventions
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The following table shows the default UNIX system prompt and superuser prompt for shells that are included in the Oracle Solaris OS. Note that the default system prompt that is displayed in command examples varies, depending on the Oracle Solaris release.
Table P-2 Shell Prompts
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