1 About DTrace

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing facility that is built into Oracle Solaris. Administrators and developers can use DTrace on live production systems to examine the behavior of user programs and operating system. DTrace enables 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 enables you to create custom programs to dynamically instrument the system and provide immediate and concise answers to arbitrary questions that you can formulate using the DTrace D programming language.

DTrace enables all Oracle Solaris users to perform the following activities:

• 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

Familiarity with a programming language such as C or a scripting language such as awk or perl will enable you to learn DTrace and the D programming language faster.