IBM AIX to Oracle Solaris Technology Mapping Guide
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Infrastructure Monitoring
Oracle Solaris 11 provides a variety of monitoring tools that span different facets of the operating system.
• Probes and tracing. In AIX, the probevue dynamic trace facility provides system and application probes
to enable administrators to observe live systems. Oracle Solaris includes the Oracle Solaris Dynamic Tracing
(DTrace) facility, a dynamic tracing framework that provides top-to-bottom system observability for
troubleshooting systemic problems in real time. Designed to quickly identify the root cause of system
performance problems, DTrace combines over 100,000 trace points with a powerful scripting language and
a simple, interactive command-line interface. It works by safely and dynamically instrumenting the running
operating system kernel and applications with trace points (known as probes) that are completely passive until
enabled. Probes can be enabled quickly for data collection, and then disabled again to minimize
performance impacts on the system being examined. Developers and administrators can use this
information to quickly identify performance bottlenecks, optimize resource utilization and performance,
and quantify resource requirements.
• Profiling. Unifying application and system profiling on Oracle Solaris platforms, Oracle Solaris Studio
DLight analyzes data from multiple sources in a synchronized fashion to trace and pinpoint application
runtime problems. Incorporating the power of DTrace technology, Oracle Solaris Studio DLight enables
developers to explore the system, understand how it works, and track down performance problems across
many software layers. More importantly, remote capabilities make it possible for users to work at one
system while monitoring services on another server running Oracle Solaris. An easy-to-use graphical
interface provides application information, including thread microstates and data on CPU, memory, thread,
and I/O usage for the duration of program execution.
• Special-purpose tools. DTrace provides a framework for building special-purpose performance
monitoring tools. Using the toolkit included in the Oracle Solaris 11 repository, as well as developer tools
such as the Performance Analyzer and DLight, developers can create tools that exploit the fundamental
facilities provided by DTrace in the operating system kernel. For example, Oracle Solaris Studio DLight
supports the creation of additional instruments, or dtracelets, for further observation of applications or
systems. Dtracelets are XML files that are used to collect information and display specific data in particular
ways. New dtracelets can be saved and displayed in the Oracle Solaris Studio DLight list of instruments and
made available system-wide or used locally by individual developers.
• Performance analysis. In Oracle Solaris, the Performance Analyzer contains tools to help assess the
performance of application code, identify potential performance problems, and locate the part of the code
where the problems occur. Support is provided for MPI applications, including an MPI timeline and MPI
charts, as well as zooming and filtering capabilities. Using Performance Analyzer in conjunction with a data
Collector tool, developers can determine resource consumption levels, identify the functions that consume
the most resources, find the source code lines and instructions that are responsible, and more.
Using DTrace in Virtualized Environments
DTrace can be used in a zone to examine applications, identify performance bottlenecks, and quantify
application resource requirements. By running DTrace in the global zone, system administrators can obtain a
global (inter-zonal) view of what is happening in a production system. This allows for debugging subtle
resource misallocation issues, a task that is much more difficult when each virtual system runs in isolation.