Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace)

Audience

System administrators, kernel developers, system tuners and application programmers who are required to monitor processes in detail on live systems.

Prerequisites

A good understanding of Sun's Solaris operating system ideally to system administration level.

Duration

2 days. Hands on.

Course Objectives

Solaris Dynamic Tracing, DTrace, is a new powerful feature introduced to Solaris 10.  It is intended for use by system administrators,system tuning personnel, kernel developers and application programmers. DTrace makes use of numerous built-in probes which can record arbitrary data from the system, trace processes on live systems, monitor kernel and application processes, all with minimal performance loss and totally programmable by the user.

Course Content

Introducing DTrace
Features, architecture, probes and D Scripts

Using DTrace
DTrace performance monitoring, aggregations, D variables, arrays, built-in macros

Debugging applications
The pid provider, application variables, transient errors, file access.

Debugging system problems
Accessing Kernel Symbols, Kernel variables and data structures, lock contention info, monitoring read calls, anonymous tracing, speculative tracing, DTrace privileges.

Troubleshooting DTrace
Minimising performance impact, DTrace buffers, debugging DTrace scripts.