DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD (Oracle Solaris Series) [Paperback]

Brendan Gregg (Author), Jim Mauro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 11, 2011 | ISBN-10: 0132091518 | ISBN-13: 978-0132091510 | Edition: 1

The Oracle Solaris DTrace feature revolutionizes the way you debug operating systems and applications. Using DTrace, you can dynamically instrument software and quickly answer virtually any question about its behavior. Now, for the first time, there's a comprehensive, authoritative guide to making the most of DTrace in any supported UNIX environment--from Oracle Solaris to OpenSolaris, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.

 

Written by key contributors to the DTrace community, DTrace teaches by example, presenting scores of commands and easy-to-adapt, downloadable D scripts. These concise examples generate answers to real and useful questions, and serve as a starting point for building more complex scripts. Using them, you can start making practical use of DTrace immediately, whether you're an administrator, developer, analyst, architect, or support professional.

 

The authors fully explain the goals, techniques, and output associated with each script or command. Drawing on their extensive experience, they provide strategy suggestions, checklists, and functional diagrams, as well as a chapter of advanced tips and tricks. You'll learn how to

• Write effective scripts using DTrace's D language
• Use DTrace to thoroughly understand system performance
• Expose functional areas of the operating system, including I/O, filesystems, and protocols
• Use DTrace in the application and database development process
• Identify and fix security problems with DTrace
• Analyze the operating system kernel
• Integrate DTrace into source code
• Extend DTrace with other tools

This book will help you make the most of DTrace to solve problems more quickly and efficiently, and build systems that work faster and more reliably.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Brendan Gregg is a performance specialist at Joyent and is known worldwide in the field of DTrace. Brendan created and developed the DTraceToolkit and is the coauthor of Solaris^TM Performance and Tools (Prentice Hall, 2006) as well as numerous articles about DTrace. Many of Brendan's DTrace scripts are shipped by default in Mac OS X.

 

Jim Mauro is a senior software engineer for Oracle Corporation, working in the Systems group with a primary focus on systems performance. Jim has 30 years of experience in the computer industry and coauthored Solaris^TM Performance and Tools and the first and second editions of Solaris^TM Internals (Sun Microsystems Press, 2000, and Prentice Hall, 2006).

Product Details

• Paperback: 1152 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (April 11, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0132091518
• ISBN-13: 978-0132091510
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 1.5 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #319,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #5 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems > BSD
  • #19 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems > Solaris

More About the Author

Brendan Gregg was born in Australia and moved to California in 2006. He is the lead performance engineer at Joyent, and is known worldwide in the fields of Solaris performance and DTrace. He was previously a performance lead and kernel engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he worked on kernel performance and developed the ZFS L2ARC. He has also been as a performance consultant and instructor, and has developed and taught performance workshops worldwide. Many of Brendan's DTrace scripts are shipped by default in Mac OS X and Oracle Solaris 11, and distributed in the DTraceToolkit.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Solaris Companion April 18, 2011

By B. Rockwood

Format:Paperback

Its finally here, the great masterpiece. This books completes what "Solaris Performance & Tools" started. This new book focuses entirely on DTrace and is really several books rolled into one.

Part I gives you a complete DTrace Textbook. It breaks down the language and introduces you all the foundational concepts. It is brisk and every concept has an example making it extremely accessable.

Part II is the combination of several runbooks and a collection of cookbooks. For CPU, I/O, network, etc there is the same methodical systematic approach to exposing problems that we got in "Performance & Tools" but vastly expanded. After hitting all the fundamental resources it breaks down into various programming languages, databases, applications and daemons.

The true value of this book is here in Part II. You may know that you have a certain kind of problem, and you know that DTrace can probly find it for you, but you don't know where to start and in what order to proceed. If you do it on your own you may quickly find yourself overwhelmed and lost in the labyrinth that is the Solaris kernel. This is why the methodical approach Jim and Brendan take is so important, you really don't need to know anything more than you need to dig into some broad problem and the text leads you down the path of elimination and analysis step-by-step.

Part III hits tools, tips, and security. Learn how to spy on users, audit activity, use Apple Instruments or DTrace in NetBeans and lots more. Chapter 13 on tools is a great way to learn about all those tools out there that you may have heard of but aren't familiar with, or even introduce you to new toys you didn't know existed.

But thats not all... there are 7 Appendix, including a complete language reference, error message reference, and cheat sheet.

The important thing about this book is that it will actually help you solve real-world problems. A hardworking sysadmin doesn't have the time it takes to learn all the ins-and-outs of Solaris's kernel and learning all of DTrace's power can take years. The book is full of examples, I think have the page count has to be just code examples that you can actually use. This book is practical, accessible and will turn any Solaris administrator into an instant rock star.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book about performance analysis in general and DTrace details September 25, 2011

By Peter B. Galvin

Format:Paperback

B Rockwood provides an excellent review of the book and there is not much to add beyond that. If you are interested in the state-of-the-art of system analysis / performance analysis and the DTrace tool that provides unprecedented levels of information available in these areas, then this is a must-have book. Highly recommended!

18 of 26 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The raw power of DTrace and the social grace of engineers, together at last. July 20, 2011

By Michael Ernest

Format:Paperback

The last book I tried to use while at my computer was the first edition of the O'Reilly behemoth UNIX Power Tools, a small phone book in both page count and page quality. Working through a very large book of very many items front to back, as I did, might seem like a fool's errand. But Power Tools was, and in its third edition must still be, a tirelessly, relentlessly cross-referenced work. I was impressed by the vigor and care its contributors applied to relate so many points of information to each other. Moreover, I was struck by the implication that I could follow suit. It was a breath of encouragement I was grateful to receive, as I wanted to grow into power user status myself. It was also a gift I think about paying forward when I teach. Like when someone again runs off with my current copy, but in a way that doesn't stress the trust I place in my colleagues.

This book on DTrace, a technology for tracing process and operating system behavior, is also quite thick, and filled with many bits of information, hard-won from examining many dark areas of system and process code. The book is, in turns, a meandering journal, a breathless mash-up of contributions, a collection of clipped, man page-style narratives, and a dry series of code and output blocks the authors sometimes deem self-evident. Some clues, such as an oft-repeated warning that the fbt provider is unstable, suggest the book was built by force of compilation alone, with little interest in supporting a read-through, much less a systematic view of the content.

It is however a formidable cache, quite possibly including every DTrace program of general consequence written in the last few years. Despite protests to the contrary, it is also partly a tribute-to-self and tour de force of its lead author, and what he has done and can do with this technology. (I agree with another reviewer who found the preening on the back cover and introduction a bit too much.) The biggest benefit the reader receives from this work, then, are the products of that facility: scripts, recipes, power tools. Call them what you like.

But an 1100-page book of any construction needs some figurative handle to manage it. Unix Power Tools provided one with a display of cross-referencing heroics I doubt we will see again. After several attempts at cutting my own path, I downloaded the scripts and just started working through them, treating the book as a resource to clarify what I couldn't divine on my own. My results with that strategy so far amount to a coin-toss. To make full use of this book, I suspect most readers will have to meet the material more than half way, providing perhaps an uncommon passion, or considerable expertise. It would be better to bring both, and a continuous caffeine feed, to succeed.