Recommended: "DTrace" by Brendan Gregg and Jim Mauro

I didn’t just wrote a long article about Exadata on the easter weekend (which is a four day “vacation” in Germany: Good friday is a day off as well as Easter Monday). I used the opportunity to read a book a second time after speed-reading it the week before. Well, to be exact … book isn’t really correct. It wasn’t the dead tree edition of it, it was the Kindle edition as the paper variant isn’t available in Germany at the moment. It was the book “DTrace” written by Brendan Gregg (the guy shouting at disk arrays) and Jim Mauro. In one short sentence:It’s great … it’s really great. I recommend it for every Solaris admin. When you think that DTrace is a rather esoteric topic for developers, read that book. If you still think this after reading the book, take out the comic you placed in the middle before ;) Fun aside: This book explains the very basics of DTraces as well as a vast number of examples how to distill important information for debugging and performance analysis out of the system with DTrace. To do so, the authors look into each main subsystem (memory, network or disk i/o), doing some basic diagnosis with a DTrace oneliner just to show the depth of the rabbit hole with some more sophisticated scripts later. Probably you fill find many examples somewhere in the Internet, however this book is a great reference for this examples when you need them most (… when you manager stands right behind you asking you questions what happens at the moment). I i have stated before: It’s a recommended read! !