To timidly go where many have gone before

I first heard about DTrace almost two years ago now. I was at a Sun event here in New York, and they'd gotten Jarod Jenson to come in and talk about DTrace. This was the only time I've ever seen him, so I don't know if he's like this all the time, but he was unbelievaby energetic. He somehow managed to fit three hours' worth of presentation into an hour and a half or less. It was obvious that he was very excited about this, and he did an excellent job of demonstrating just how useful DTrace could be.

This was before Solaris 10 was officially released and even before DTrace was available in Solaris Express, as I discovered to my disappointment the next day when I installed the currently-available Solaris Express. I played with it some when it did become available, but I was unable to do anything really useful with it until we started using it in production, which we first did when we were evaluating a T2000. I'll detail my successes with DTrace in later posts. I'm hesitant to do so, as the analyses I did with DTrace were close to the simplest things one can do with it. In the end, however, I think that the simplicity itself will speak to the power of DTrace.