DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD - Softcover

Gregg, Brendan; Mauro, Jim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0132091518 ISBN 13: 9780132091510

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover

The first guide to DTrace: the breakthrough debugging tool for Mac OS X, Unix, Solaris, and OpenSolaris operating systems and applications

Complete coverage: architecture, implementation, components, usage, and much more

Covers integrating DTrace into open source code, and integrating probes into application software

Includes full chapter of advanced tips and techniques

For users of DTrace on all platforms

Foreword by Bryan Cantril, creator of DTrace

DTrace represents a revolution in debugging. Using it, administrators, developers, and service personnel can dynamically instrument operating systems and applications to quickly ask and answer virtually any question about how their operating systems or user programs are behaving. Now available for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD, thousands of professionals are discovering DTrace - but, until now, there's been no comprehensive, authoritative guide to using it. This book fills that gap. Written by four key contributors to the DTrace community, it's the first single source reference to this powerful new technology. The authors cover everything technical professionals need to know to succeed with DTrace, regardless of the operating system or application they want to instrument. The book also includes a full chapter of advanced tips and techniques.

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0132091518
• ISBN 13: 9780132091510
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1115