Awesome DTrace

A curated list of awesome DTrace books, articles, videos, tools and resources.

Contents

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

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.

Contributing

Contributions are more than welcome! Please see contribution guidelines first.