20 Writing DTrace Consumers

A consumer is a program that interacts with the DTrace framework to enable instrumentation and consumes tracing data for further processing. In addition to the DTrace IPS package, which includes lockstat, plockstat, intrastat, and powertop consumers, you can write your own custom consumer by using APIs in the libdtrace library. For more information, see the lockstat(8), plockstat(8), intrstat(8), and powertop(8) man pages.

This chapter discusses the APIs available in the libdtrace library. It also describes the functions to aggregate data and interfaces to create custom handlers for events such as drops and runtime errors.

This chapter contains the following topics:

• Creating Custom DTrace Consumers

• DTrace Consumer Functions

• Processing Traced Data in DTrace

• Processing Aggregation Data in DTrace

• Processing of Aggregations in DTrace

• DTrace Handler Interfaces

• Process Control Interface in DTrace

For more information about these APIs, see DTrace Consumer Functions and libdtrace API Reference.