Awesome DTrace 
A curated list of awesome DTrace books, articles, videos, tools and resources.
DTrace
GitHub repository ↗ synced 2026/8/9
Awesome DTrace
Learn
Recommended reading for learning DTrace.
Books
Dynamic Tracing Guide
Illumos.org DTrace guide.
DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD
Official DTrace book.
Dynamic Tracing with DTrace & SystemTap
A book introduces both DTrace and SystemTap.
Other
dtrace(1m) man page
DTrace manual page.
DTrace cheatsheet
DTrace cheatsheet by Brendan Gregg.
DTrace one-liners
DTrace one liners. Handy commands.
DTrace one-liners (FreeBSD)
DTrace one liners from FreeBSD.
DTrace QuickStart
DTrace quick starting guide.
Using DTrace stories
A collection of using DTrace to debug system stories.
Advanced DTrace Tips, Tricks and Gotchas
A collection of advanced tips for using DTrace.
Articles
Interesting articles about DTrace and real-world use cases.
PID Provider
pid provider: entry probe
DTrace PID Provider.
pid provider: entry arguments
DTrace PID Provider Arguments.
pid provider: return
DTrace PID Provider return.
pid provider: instructions
DTrace PID Provider Instructions.
pid provider: overhead
DTrace PID Provider Overhead.
pid provider exposed
PID providers internals by Adam Leventhal.
When magic collides
PID provider bug deep dive by Bryan Cantrill.
USDT provider
Understanding DTrace ustack helpers
DTrace ustack helpers.
USDT Providers Redux
Reference for building USDT providers in custom applications.
Sysevent provider
DTrace sysevent provider
Solaris/illumos sysevent provider for DTrace.
Ruby and DTrace
Using DTrace to measure mutex contention in Ruby
Mutex contention measuring in Ruby.
Visualization methods
Flamegraphs
A visualization of profiled software, allowing the most frequent code-paths to be identified quickly and accurately.
Heat Maps
Heat maps allow three dimensions of data to be visualized, similar to weather radar maps where color is used as a dimension.
Videos
DTrace review
Bryan Cantrill explains how to significantly improve debugging both for development and live systems with DTrace.
Interesting videos about DTrace.
dtrace.conf
Software
List of software with DTrace support.
Programming languages
Erlang
DTrace and Erlang/OTP.
lua-usdt
Libusdt bindings for Lua.
node-dtrace-provider
Native DTrace probes for Node.js apps.
perl-Devel-DTrace-Provider
Perl wrapper for libusdt.
PHP
Using PHP and DTrace.
Python
DTrace patch for Python 2.7.x and 3.x.
python-usdt
Libusdt bindings for Python.
Ruby
Ruby DTrace probes.
ruby-usdt
Native DTrace probes for ruby apps.
Erlang
Lua
Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Databases
MySQL
MySQL DTrace probes.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL DTrace probes.
Webservers
mod_usdt
"httpd" DTrace provider.
Visualization
FlameGraph
Stack trace visualizer.
node-stackvis
Stack trace visualizer.
Tools
DTraceToolkit
A collection of useful documented DTrace scripts.
dtrace-cloud-tools
DTrace tools written for the SmartOS/SmartDataCenter cloud (illumos-based).
pgsql tools
Report top-level PostgreSQL stats.
portsnoop
Trace event port activity.
storage tools
Report NFS, CIFS and iSCSI stats.
Community
Community site
DTrace community site.
Mailing list
DTrace community mailing list.
FreeBSD DTrace mailing list
FreeBSD DTrace community mailing list.
China DTrace
A Chinese DTrace site.