iTechNote

Mr. Cantrill came up with the general idea for DTrace in 1996, while he was a computer-science student at Brown University, but didn’t get to start work on it until late 2001. It took nearly three years for him and his team — Michael Shapiro, a Sun distinguished engineer, and Adam Leventhal, a staff engineer — to make it work; a final version shipped early last year as part of Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system.

Where most debugging takes place as software is being developed, DTrace analyzes problems with systems that are in production — running a company’s database, say, or executing stock trades. It does this with a process called “dynamic tracing,” which enables a developer or systems administrator to run diagnostic tests on a system without causing it to crash. Before DTrace, such tests often took days or weeks to reproduce the problem and identify the cause. With DTrace, performance problems can be tracked to their underlying causes in hours, even minutes.

It is time to get serious about DTrace folks. Sun has provided quite a number of guides to get you started. You can find the official resources at BigAdmin DTrace and also enough examples to get you excited at Brendan Gregg’s Homepage.

via WSJ