What's an alternative for DTrace on Linux?

linux dtrace
JanePhanie picture JanePhanie · Jan 13, 2010 · Viewed 30.5k times · Source

From what I can see, a DTrace implementation on Linux is held up by licensing and politics. What are the alternatives currently?

Answer

Alex Brown picture Alex Brown · Jan 13, 2010

Systemtap is designed to solve the same sort of problems as dtrace, and has a similar user interface – the user writes small scripts which attach actions to named probes.

It is said to be unstable, it's not usually compiled into your kernel by default, but once I got it working I didn't have any problems.

You can see how it compares to dtrace in this table on the systemtap website (May be partisan :-)

Dtrace has been partly ported to Linux by Paul Fox, an enthusiast, and is available for download for you to try - check out the links on his blog.

It has been said that kprobes are a dtrace replacement, but I've never tried them.

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