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DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD 1st Edition

by Brendan Gregg (Author), Jim Mauro (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 24 ratings
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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.

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    1. ISBN-10
      0132091518
    2. ISBN-13
      978-0132091510
    3. Edition
      1st
    4. Publisher
      Prentice Hall
    5. Publication date
      January 1, 2012
    6. Language
      English
    7. Dimensions
      7 x 1.5 x 9 inches
    8. Print length
      1115 pages
    9. See all details
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    Amazon First Reads | Editors' picks at exclusive prices

    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 SolarisTM 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 SolarisTM Performance and Tools and the first and second editions of SolarisTM Internals (Sun Microsystems Press, 2000, and Prentice Hall, 2006).

    Product details

    • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Prentice Hall; 1st edition (January 1, 2012)
    • Language ‏ : ‎ English
    • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 1115 pages
    • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0132091518
    • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0132091510
    • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3 pounds
    • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1.5 x 9 inches
    • Customer Reviews:
      4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 24 ratings

    About the author

    Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
    Brendan Gregg

    Brendan Gregg

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    Brendan Gregg is an industry expert in computing performance and cloud computing. He is a senior performance architect at Netflix, where he does performance design, evaluation, analysis, and tuning. He is the author of multiple technical books including BPF Performance Tools published by Addison Wesley, and Systems Performance published by Prentice Hall. Brendan received the USENIX 2013 LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration.

    Brendan has created numerous performance analysis tools, which have been included in multiple operating systems. His recent work includes developing methodologies and visualizations for performance analysis, including flame graphs. Born in Australia and later working in the Asia Pacific region, he has lived in the US since 2006.

    Customer reviews

    4.6 out of 5 stars
    24 global ratings

    Top reviews from the United States

    DetlefD
    5.0 out of 5 stars The must-read book for everyone who needs DTrace
    Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2012
    Verified Purchase
    This is a must-read book if you plan to use DTrace for your needs. It not only explains the syntax and HowTo of Dtrace. It also shows many examples and - very useful - discusses the results and some background that makes it easier to understand the results of the scripts. That makes the book a real win - it's not just an explanation of Dtrace, but also a book to understand better the tools for systems monitoring and tracing. All this is clearly a result of the experience of the two expert authors Brendan and Jim.
    2 people found this helpful
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    Christopher Cope
    5.0 out of 5 stars Everything you really need to know about DTrace in a ...
    Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2014
    Verified Purchase
    Everything you really need to know about DTrace in a single book, yet with plenty of examples, source, and references to branch out from.
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    Jeff Benshetler
    4.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction, Content Out-of-Date
    Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2014
    Verified Purchase
    This is a good way to get started using DTrace on Solaris or FreeBSD. (I haven't tried the Linux version.) The book does a good job describing the overall structure of a DTrace script, including providers, probes, conditions, and actions. It also has a number of good examples, although perhaps 25% of the example no longer work because DTrace is evolving rapidly. That DTrace has rapidly evolved beyond what it was when this book was publish is the reason the book gets 4 stars instead of 5.

    The book is well worth the purchase as a learning tool albeit less useful as a reference.
    10 people found this helpful
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    B. Rockwood
    5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Solaris Companion
    Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2011
    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.
    16 people found this helpful
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    Darrin Johnson
    5.0 out of 5 stars An Essential Book for Any Developer
    Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2011
    In a nutshell, it is a very good book especially once you get beyond the narcissism embedded in the forward and introduction. From my perspective this book serves three valuable purposes - as a tutorial, as a reference, and a resource for cool tips, tricks and generally making an software engineer's life easier.

    As a tutorial, this book provides one of the most cogent introductions to Dtrace I have seen including web content and prior books. The book, in a couple of chapters, provides a good overview of the purpose and architecture of Dtrace, the D language semantics to rudimentary examples including the canonical "Hello World". As a tutorial is great for both the neophyte and seasoned engineers. The rest of the book continues tutorial delving into key subsystems (e.g. CPU, Memory, IO, low-level networking, filesystems, etc.) to language to application use of Dtrace. Each section will provide a good introduction and numerous valuable examples to the engineer interested in each respective area.

    Probably the weakest aspect of this book is as a pure reference book but I don't think that is its intent. The book includes several valuable appendices on Dtrace Tunable Variables, D Language Reference, Provider Arguments, etc. However it is likely that most engineers will tag key sections that are relevant to their particular interests/needs.

    Also a book of cool tips and tricks, this books has a huge number examples, Tips and Tricks section, Tools, etc. with every engineer (system, middleware, end-user application development) benefiting from the specific examples and/or the ideas being conveyed. I would say that this is especially useful for even the engineers who may already be familiar with Dtrace but haven't leveraged it's capabilities to the fullest.

    However on the downside this book doesn't provide a comprehensive to non-dtrace based observability nor does it cover the limitations (e.g. data flow through network stack) and consequences of using dtrace (e.g. probe effect, etc.) at least from my review of the content. However as a resource it is very useful to both new hires and seasoned engineers and
    is a complementary to the slightly dated "Solaris(tm) Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris" book by Solaris(tm) by Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro and Brendan Gregg.

    Overall a definite buy!
    3 people found this helpful
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    Top reviews from other countries

    Keith
    5.0 out of 5 stars Detailed, but focuses on Solaris.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 22, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    The book provides detailed information and many examples. But they're all for Solaris and, in many instances, must be ported. But the book provides sufficient information to allow you to do that if you have the source for your OS.
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