Uing DTrace with Java Technology Based Applications: Bridging the Observability Gap
Presented by Jonathan Haslam, Simon Ritter, Sun Microsystems
In what I thought was completely great showmanship between Jonathan Haslam and Simon ritter, it was simply, pure comedy, having the two of them on stage. No reason to go deeply into notes (as the verbose slides are available), but the actual demonstration, the writing the code on stage, and the dynamics between the two – that made this session pure gold to attend.
You can ask a system to panic with DTrace if you want!
Some terminology:
- Probe: place of interest in the system where we can make observations
- Provider: instruments a particular area of a system, and makes probes available. Transfers control into DTrace framework when an enabled probe is hit
- Aggregation: patterns are more interesting than individual datum, so aggregate data together to look for arrays. Generally an associative array
DTrace has a PID provider, to look at applications based on PID
dvm provider is a java.net project to add DTrace support in. Install a new shared library, and make sure its in the path.
DTrace in JDK6 exists as a hotspot provider. No need to download a shared library. Its also more feature-rich.
Project DAVE (DTrace Advanced Visualisation Environment) was demoed. Also note that there’s chime.
