Dynamic Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting With DTrace

Course Overview

The Dynamic Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting with DTrace course provides students with the ability to use DTrace to diagnose application and system problems. This course replaces SA-325-S10.

Audience

Students who can benefit from this course are experienced system administrators, service support personnel, kernel developers, and application program developers

Skills Gained

Upon Completion Of This Course, Students Should Be Able To:

• Use DTrace to find the source of intermittent problems.
• Use DTrace to look at the cause of performance problems.
• Use DTrace to help debug applications.
• Find System problems with DTrace
• Troubleshoot DTrace script problems.

Prerequisites

To succeed fully in this course, students should be able to administer the Solaris 10 Operating System, have a general understandaing of the Solaris kernel, and have some programming experience such as Perl or C.

Course Outline

Module 1 - DTrace Fundamentals

• Describe the features of DTrace
• Describe the DTrace architecture

Module 2 - Using DTrace

• Examining performance problems using DTrace
• Use DTrace to obtain information about system calls
• Create D Scripts that Use Arguments

Module 3 - Debug Applications with DTrace

• Use DTrace to profile an application
• Use DTrace to access application variables
• Use DTrace to find transient system call errors
• Use DTrace to determine the names of files being opened

Module 4 - Finding System Problems with DTrace

• Use DTrace to access kernel variables
• Use DTrace to obtain information about read calls
• Use DTrace to do anonymous tracing
• Use DTrace to do speculative tracing
• Explain the privileges necessary to run DTrace operations

Module 5 - Troubleshooting DTrace Problems

• Describe how to lessen the performance impact of DTrace
• Describe how to use and tune DTrace buffers
• Debug DTrace scripts

Follow Up Courses

Before:

• Solaris 9 Operating System Internals (SP-365)
• UNIX System Interface Programming (SI-220)

After:

• Solaris System Performance Management (SA-400)