Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

The ramblings of an Australian SaND TSC* Principal Field Technologist

* Solaris and Network Domain Technology Support Centre - The group I work for

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pageicon Sunday Jun 27, 2004

Dtrace article and comments on OSnews

OSnews has listed an article from Sysadmin Magazine that came out earlier this month titled Dtrace -- Most exposing Solaris tool ever. There appears to be some good discussion on the article and on zealotry in the OSnews comments on it too.

The article is an interview between the Author and the architects behind dtrace (Bryan Cantril, Adam Leventhal and Mike Shapiro). They discuss the motivation behind Dtrace and give some examples of of it has been used inside Sun already to solve some hairy problems. The problem that they walk through in Chapter 9 of the paper is a beauty, and I don't think that we would have gotten to the root cause in anywhere near the time that we did without Dtrace, if indeed we could even have found root cause without it.

One of the folks commenting on OSnews also pointed to http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/dtrace/d10_latest.pdf which contains the latest version of the reference guide. I should also say that the forum hosting this is also worth a visit. It also contains a few other tidbits of interest such as the paper being presented at USENIX, a link to the original post by Bryan announcing Dtrace and a few other goodies.

It's also great to see that some folks still have faith in us as an innovator. Solaris 10 will justify this faith. Stay tuned, there is more to come yet :)

Posted at 01:39PM Jun 27, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris Express  |