Overview – 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.
This document cites any implementation differences between the platform types.
Audience – 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.
Required knowledge – 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
Late-breaking information and known issues for this product are included in the documentation library at http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=E36784.
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