Vortragsdetails

DTrace - Practical use in the Datacenter

von Ulrich Gräf (Sun Microsystems Inc.)

Freitag, 01.06.2007, Saal 5: Wiesbaden, 17:00-18:00 Uhr

DTrace is a new way to monitor an operating system and applications. The traditional way instruments the operating system with breakpoints and slows it down significantly. Usually this needs running the operating system under a debugger (Solaris / OpenSolaris: kadb) which is not suitable for production machines. DTrace is a follow on product to kstat (since Solaris 8), which makes counters in the operating system visible to user applications. Most of the monitoring tools like iostat, vmstat, mpstat, netstat, nfsstat, ... are based on kstat since then. But in the new world the system host more than one application and it is necessary to detect, which application causes the disk-, cpu-, or network overload. DTrace has a total new approach by activating kernel measuring probes and establish round-robin buffers for the measured data, which are read by the dtrace application. This allows to process the data very efficient, which does not disturb the kernel work noticable. Therefore DTrace is suitable for production machines. This talk explains DTrace and shows some examples which help the system administrator to determine which applications are bad behaving.

Über den Autor Ulrich Gräf:

Ulrich Gräf did his studies at the TH Darmstadt (University of Darmstadt) from 1979 to 1985 concentrating on the areas Computer Architecture, Programming Languages and Operating Systems and gaining experience for Siemens BS2000, IBM VM/CMS, PCS Munix and others.
He then worked for the Datacenter for Computer Science of TH Darmstadt of until 1986 working as an admin for Siemens BS2000 and Unix systems.
Then he moved to the Institute of theoretical Computer Science, Systems Programming Group where he worked further with PCS Munix.
One achievement there was the connection of BS2000 and the Munix Systems to the Europe wide IBM sponsored EARN mail network.
From 1990 to 1991 he moved to the central datacenter of TH Darmstadt to work on the connection of TH Darmstadt to the Internet (server infrastructure with AIX, IP interface supervision) .
In 1992 Ulrich joined Sun Microsystems as a presales system engineer for sales and marketing in the financial services branch.
From 1996 to 2000 he worked to develop the german benchmarking center of Sun Microsystems.
Since then he is responsible for Solaris and Performance troughout Germany. Since 2001 as an OS Ambassador, who helps exchanging new ideas and needs between Solaris engineering and customers.