DTrace

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DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework created by Sun Microsystems. It was released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in January 2005 and included in Sun's Solaris 10 for troubleshooting system problems in real time. DTrace was the first component of OpenSolaris to be released under the CDDL.

DTrace allows performance tuning and troubleshooting of applications on production systems—all with little or no performance impact. DTrace provides improved visibility into kernel and application activity, giving the user operational insights with which they can make performance gains.

DTrace was written and designed by Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro, and Adam Leventhal. The authors received recognition in 2005 for the innovations in DTrace from InfoWorld and Technology Review. DTrace won the top prize in the Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards competition.

Although DTrace is tightly integrated with the Solaris kernel, work is in progress to port DTrace to FreeBSD (in which there has been initial success[1]) to substitute the ktrace utility, and the source code is freely available as part of OpenSolaris.

On August 7, 2006, Apple announced that DTrace will be built into Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard". [2]

[edit] References

Bryan Cantrill (February 2006). "Hidden in Plain Sight". ACM Queue 4 (1): 26–36. DOI:10.1145/1117389.1117401. ISSN 1542-7730. Retrieved on 2006-09-08.
Bryan M. Cantrill, Michael W. Shapiro and Adam H. Leventhal (June 2004). "Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems". Proceedings of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Retrieved on 2006-09-08.