15 Facts About DTrace

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time.

DTrace can be used to get a global overview of a running system, such as the amount of memory, CPU time, filesystem and network resources used by the active processes.

In September 2016 the OpenDTrace effort began on github with both code and comprehensive documentation of the system's internals.

The OpenDTrace effort maintains the original CDDL licensing for the code from OpenSolaris with additional code contributions coming under a BSD 2 Clause license.

The goal of OpenDTrace is to provide an OS agnostic, portable implementation of DTrace that is acceptable to all consumers, including macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Linux as well as embedded systems.

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Sun Microsystems designed DTrace to give operational insights that allow users to tune and troubleshoot applications and the OS itself.

DTrace first became available for use in November 2003, and was formally released as part of Sun's Solaris 10 in January 2005.

DTrace was the first component of the OpenSolaris project to have its source code released under the Common Development and Distribution License .

DTrace is an integral part of illumos and related distributions.

Linux port of DTrace has been available since 2008; work continues actively to enhance and fix issues.

The Linux DTrace implementation is a loadable kernel module, which means that the kernel itself requires no modification, and thus allows DTrace to avoid CDDL vs GPL licensing conflicts .

However, once DTrace is loaded the kernel instance will be marked as tainted.

Application providers allow DTrace to follow the operation of applications through system calls and into the kernel.

DTrace was designed and implemented by Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro, and Adam Leventhal.

DTrace won the top prize in The Wall Street Journals 2006 Technology Innovation Awards competition.