Solaris Performance and Tools: Dtrace and Mdb Techniques for Solaris 10 and Opensolaris

I will make this as short as I can, unlike the one for the companion book, Solaris Internals. I have been troubleshooting Sun Solaris for 15 years, in one version or another. Crash dump analysis was the main way to get data from within the kernel and only if the system blew a gasket. There have been different methods through the years,crash, kdb, and mdb are the main ones, but now with Solaris 10 you can add a powerful tool to your knowledge tool box, DTrace. This is built in to the system code so its not a seperate program that you run, it lives in Solaris and you enable the probes you want to see. Interpreting the data is not easy if you dont know what you are looking at, so the Companion book tells you what the internal workings are so you can know what you are looking at. This book tells you how to find the most used issues or problems. It covers these things in more detail than you can find unless you work in and engineering lab and program apps for Solaris. Solaris 10 has many things in it that can throw an admin, Zones for instance, can throw you if you are having some type of performance issue, but what can you do to get the data from the kernel to watch the internal processes deep under the hood? DTrace should be the first thing out of your mouth. This is a top notch book and I understand other people's issues or questions with it, however, assume you have not touched Solaris 10 in production and your company is doing a technology refresh and migration to new Sun Hardware and Solaris 10. How are you going to help your company troubleshoot issues in this new envrionment? You will use DTrace and any other tools you can. I use DTrace almost every day. I did today. So if you want to know how Dtrace and mdb and other utility commands are used, buy this book and sit down on a Solaris 10 box and start typing. If you want to see other people's take on it, go to one of the Author's web sites. Brendan Gregg. You can look him up on the web. This is a fine fine add on book and I have two copies of it too. One at home and one in my book bag. It is one of my top 10 carried books when I travel. Kudo's to Brendan, Rich, and Jim. Thanks and keep up the good work. Sincerely Bill Branson

I found this to be one of the best manuals for dtrace, iostat and mdb that I have ever seen. Not only were there good examples but there were lots of them. Why can't these people write the man pages in Solaris?

The "Solaris Internals" and "Solaris Performance and Tools" combined to give any UNIX-guru-wannabe the perfect environment to learn and appreciate the Solaris Operating System. "Solaris Performance and Tools" introduces the tools and utilities available on the latest Solaris release which is Solaris 10 and its simply GREAT ! Its definitely a MUST-HAVE for UNIX administrators. Btw, it has a great section on using DTrace and MDB which is not too terse but enough to get you started. "Solaris Internals" introduces the architecture of Solaris and many of its components together with their internals and you can use your knowledge of DTrace and combined it with that gained from this book and build interesting monitoring strategies

I been working with solaris for the last 10 years. Some times we had to struggle with performance monitoring and tuning on our highend servers. I think this book gives an excellent opportunity to look back on our architecture and design for the major database and application systems.

"Solaris Internals" and its predecessor "Sun Performance and Tuning" are wonderful books for giving you the knowledge to know whats actually happening under the covers, but many SA's admit struggling when it comes to translating that into usable day-to-day understanding of the systems on which they manage. Just knowing how it works isn't enough to be really useful, what you need is the ability to look at the system and work out how what your seeing fits what you know. "Solaris Performance and Tools" bridges that gap. Every page, cover-to-cover is filled with practical examples and explanations of the tools that let you actually see what Solaris is doing. If you've tended to rely on only a handful of tools such as vmstat, iostat, netstat, sar, and prstat, then you really want to get this book and start digging much deeper. Even as a Sr Admin I found that there were wonderful tools available that I didn't even know existed (such as "intrstat"). In particular, this book unlocks two powerful tools in Solaris 10 that can be as complex as they are powerful: DTrace and mdb. Both of these give you unparalleled power to dig your fingers into the system, but using them beyond simple one liners is more difficult than most people admin. This book gives you a great step-by-step approach to learning both. While a one-line DTrace script found in a blog might help you here and there, you won't truly understand how powerful DTrace can be untill you've built a firm foundation on which to build your own. This book is the best way to jump start that process. This truly is the only book available that opens the window to whats possible in Solaris in such a practical way. You'll find things you didn't know, you'll start understanding how things work by putting practical numbers on YOUR system together with the knowledge you aquired from "Solaris Internals" and you'll start solving problems rathan than just knowing why somethings broken or slow. Every Solaris SA should have a copy of this book on their desk for quick and easy reference. Stop guessing, start knowing.