Highlights

The Solaris 10 Operating System dramatically improves the way system administrators and developers can identify the reasons for suboptimal system and application performance. Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology makes it possible to delve deeply into today’s complex systems to troubleshoot systemic problems in real time. Additional Solaris features provide you with enhanced system insight, enabling you to quickly identify and resolve hardware problems, and streamline and automate patch management.

• Real-time troubleshooting of systemic problems
• New tools for low-level system debugging
• System hardware testing and analysis
• Fine-grained project accounting
• Enhanced patch analysis and delivery tools
• Existing applications benefit from Solaris 10 enhancements without modification

DLight

DLight is a plug-in for the Sun Studio development environment that unites information you get from typical application profiling tools with system profiling tools such as DTrace.

• First tool to unify, and make accessible, sophisticated application and system profiling for developers
• Now available as part of Sun Studio 12 Update 1
• Utilize and visualize dynamic tracing (DTrace) technology
• Simple, interactive, drag and drop interface

Dynamic Tracing (DTrace)

DTrace is a comprehensive, advanced tracing tool for troubleshooting systemic problems in real time. With DTrace, administrators, integrators, and developers can tune applications for performance and troubleshoot production systems—all with little or no performance impact.

Delivering accurate and precise analytical information quickly and safely on production, development, or test systems—with a single view from kernel to application—DTrace gives you operational insights and performance gains that you can’t achieve with any other operating system. DTrace will quickly become a strategic tool in your quest to develop better performing, higher quality applications, helping you save significant time and money when debugging complex problems.

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris Operating Environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.

This new project proposes to add DTrace probes into the MPI library and will allow tracing of key communication events for parallel application software, thus making DTrace's award-winning observability characteristics available to high-performance compute environments.

• How to Download, Install, and Run the NetBeans Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) GUI Plugin
• How-To Guide: Managing ZFS in Solaris 10 Containers
• How-To Guide:Working With ZFS Snapshots
• DTrace Article on Sun Developer Network: Using DTrace to Demystify Watchpoints in the Sun Studio dbx Debugger
• DTrace Demo
• DTrace Data Sheet
• Feature Article: Peer Deep With DTrace
• DTrace Guide
• BigAdmin Page: DTrace

System Analysis Tools

Solaris 10 offers a number of other system analysis tools to give you better insight into your systems. These tools include:

• Powerful thread analysis and monitoring tools, including lockstat, truss, and pstack
• Memory management and debugging tools, including libumem, a high-performance multithreaded memory allocation library with built-in monitoring functions
• Support for Intelligent Platform Monitoring Interface (IPMI), an industry standard for “lights out” management of x64/x86-based servers
• Modular Debugger (mdb) and Kernel Modular Debugger (kmdb), powerful and extensible tools for monitoring and analyzing applications and kernel routines
• System and application core administration and debugging tools
• Sun Validation Test Suite for hardware testing and analysis

• More Details About IPMI

Process Accounting and Statistics

The Solaris 10 project and task facilities allow you to label and separate workloads, as well as monitor resource consumption by each workload. The extended accounting subsystem captures a detailed set of resource consumption statistics on both processes and tasks. In conjunction with the Internet Protocol Quality of Service (IPQoS) flow accounting module, this subsystem can also capture network flow information on a system.

• Extended Accounting Guide

Enhanced Patch Management

Proper system analysis can be critical to system availability and performance. To this end, the Solaris 10 Operating System includes tools to manually or automatically perform patch management, including analyzing the system to determine which patches are appropriate for your configuration.