Chapter 9

Aggregations

When instrumenting the system to answer performance-related questions, it is useful to consider how data can be aggregated to answer a specific question rather than thinking in terms of data gathered by individual probes. For example, if you wanted to know the number of system calls by user ID, you would not necessarily care about the datum collected at each system call. You simply want to see a table of user IDs and system calls. Historically, you would answer this question by gathering data at each system call, and postprocessing the data using a tool like awk(1) or perl(1). However, in DTrace the aggregating of data is a first-class operation. This chapter describes the DTrace facilities for manipulating aggregations.