The Tool That Was Already There

Unix Universe, on dynamic instrumentation and what it costs not to use it. In 2001 Bryan Cantrill, Michael Shapiro and Adam Leventhal began work at Sun Microsystems on a facility for instrumenting production systems; DTrace took twenty-three months and shipped with Solaris 10 in March 2005, and their USENIX paper of 2004 states the guarantees plainly: the ability to instrument user-level and…