Chapter 34

Statically Defined Tracing for User Applications

DTrace provides a facility for user application developers to define customized probes in application code to augment the capabilities of the pid provider. These static probes impose little to no overhead when disabled and are dynamically enabled like all other DTrace probes. You can use static probes to describe application semantics to users of DTrace without exposing or requiring implementation knowledge of your applications. This chapter describes how to define static probes in user applications and how to use DTrace to enable such probes in user processes.