DTrace

I’ve certainly hinted at it before, but if there’s one good reason for Oracle techies to run Solaris 10 (or OpenSolaris) on their home equipment, it’s this.

As far as I’m aware, there is nothing available on Linux which is within a million miles of DTrace in helping you see what’s happening at the operating system level. I’ve finally had the chance to play around with it properly this weekend and it’s everything I expected although definitely easier than I thought, thanks to this extremely useful site from Brendan Gregg to get you going. (I’ve also added a couple of DTrace-related Blogs to the Unix section of my blog-roll – over there on the right somewhere)

Maybe it’s an acquired taste, but it’s been a while since I’ve been quite so excited about the level of detail that I can see if I want to.
I only wish I hadn’t found it 3 weeks before UKOUG 😉 but I might consider it for Hotsos 2007.

Now if only ZFS would excite me as much!