Awesome DTrace – Massive Collection of Resources

Contents

• Learn
• Articles
• Videos
• Software
• Tools
• Community

Learn

Recommended reading for learning DTrace.

Books

• Dynamic Tracing Guide – Illumos.org DTrace guide.
• DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD – Official DTrace book.
• Dynamic Tracing with DTrace & SystemTap – A book introduces both DTrace and SystemTap.

Other

• dtrace(1m) man page – DTrace manual page.
• DTrace cheatsheet – DTrace cheatsheet by Brendan Gregg.
• DTrace one-liners – DTrace one liners. Handy commands.
• DTrace one-liners (FreeBSD) – DTrace one liners from FreeBSD.
• DTrace QuickStart – DTrace quick starting guide.
• Using DTrace stories – A collection of using DTrace to debug system stories.
• Advanced DTrace Tips, Tricks and Gotchas – A collection of advanced tips for using DTrace.

Articles

Interesting articles about DTrace and real-world use cases.

PID Provider

• pid provider: entry probe – DTrace PID Provider.
• pid provider: entry arguments – DTrace PID Provider Arguments.
• pid provider: return – DTrace PID Provider return.
• pid provider: instructions – DTrace PID Provider Instructions.
• pid provider: overhead – DTrace PID Provider Overhead.
• pid provider exposed – PID providers internals by Adam Leventhal.
• When magic collides – PID provider bug deep dive by Bryan Cantrill.

USDT provider

• Understanding DTrace ustack helpers – DTrace ustack helpers.
• USDT Providers Redux – Reference for building USDT providers in custom applications.

Sysevent provider

• DTrace sysevent provider – Solaris/illumos sysevent provider for DTrace.

Ruby and DTrace

• Using DTrace to measure mutex contention in Ruby – Mutex contention measuring in Ruby.

Visualization methods

• Flamegraphs – A visualization of profiled software, allowing the most frequent code-paths to be identified quickly and accurately.
• Heat Maps – Heat maps allow three dimensions of data to be visualized, similar to weather radar maps where color is used as a dimension.

Videos

Interesting videos about DTrace.

• DTrace review – Bryan Cantrill explains how to significantly improve debugging both for development and live systems with DTrace.

dtrace.conf

• dtrace.conf 2008
  • NFSv3 and iSCSI providers
  • DTrace for hardware
  • Zones & DTrace
  • DTracing a Solaris build
  • War Stories
  • Sun Benchmarks
  • Erlang
  • Erlang (continued)
  • Instrumenting Adobe AIR
  • HotSpot Runtime & Java
  • PostgreSQL: Looking Under the Hood with Solaris
  • PostgreSQL Provider
  • Distributed DTrace
  • Apple Port of DTrace
• dtrace.conf 2012
  • DTrace State of the Union
  • User-Level CTF
  • Dynamic Translators
  • Clang Parser for DTrace
  • Visualizations
  • Visualizations, Enabling Toolchain for Seamless USDT
  • More Visualizations
  • DTrace in Node.js
  • DTrace and Erlang
  • DTrace on Linux
  • ZFS Provider
  • DTrace on FreeBSD
  • Barriers to DTrace Adoption
• dtrace.conf 2016
  • Introduction
  • (Useful!) DTrace intro
  • CTF Everywhere!
  • Distributed DTrace
  • DTracign Apps
  • DTrace and JSON: Together at last!
  • ASSERT() as a DTrace probe (and why I need some help)
  • Implementing (or not) fds[] in FreeBSD
  • OpenDTrace
  • DTrace Performance Improvements with Always-on Instrumentation
  • D language improvements
  • D Syntactic Sugar
  • DTrace and Go
  • DTrace and Postgres
  • DTrace in the Zone
  • DTrace ustack() performance improvements
  • DTrace Exploitation

Software

List of software with DTrace support.

Programming languages

Erlang

• Erlang – DTrace and Erlang/OTP.

Lua

• lua-usdt – Libusdt bindings for Lua.

Node.js

• node-dtrace-provider – Native DTrace probes for Node.js apps.

Perl

• perl-Devel-DTrace-Provider – Perl wrapper for libusdt.

PHP

• PHP – Using PHP and DTrace.

Python

• Python – DTrace patch for Python 2.7.x and 3.x.
• python-usdt – Libusdt bindings for Python.

Ruby

• Ruby – Ruby DTrace probes.
• ruby-usdt – Native DTrace probes for ruby apps.

Databases

• MySQL – MySQL DTrace probes.
• PostgreSQL – PostgreSQL DTrace probes.

Webservers

• mod_usdt – “httpd” DTrace provider.

Visualization

• FlameGraph – Stack trace visualizer.
• node-stackvis – Stack trace visualizer.

Tools

• DTraceToolkit – A collection of useful documented DTrace scripts.
• dtrace-cloud-tools – DTrace tools written for the SmartOS/SmartDataCenter cloud (illumos-based).
• pgsql tools – Report top-level PostgreSQL stats.
• portsnoop – Trace event port activity.
• storage tools – Report NFS, CIFS and iSCSI stats.

Community

• Community site – DTrace community site.
• Mailing list – DTrace community mailing list.
• FreeBSD DTrace mailing list – FreeBSD DTrace community mailing list.
• China DTrace – A Chinese DTrace site.