OpenSolaris

1. Project: Chime Visualization Tool for DTrace
   1. Installation
   2. Change Log
   3. Displays
   4. Adding New Displays
      1. New Display Wizard
         1. Adding Drilldown
      2. Command Line
      3. XML Properties
   5. Java DTrace API
      1. jdtrace Example
   6. Blogs
   7. Announcements
   8. Discussions
   9. Leaders
   10. Observers
   11. Articles

OpenSolaris Project: Chime Visualization Tool for DTrace

View the leaders for this project
Project Observers

Endorsing communities

DTrace
Desktop

Chime

Chime is a graphical tool for visualizing DTrace aggregations. It provides an alternative to similar CLI-based tools (such as intrstat) that is more visually appealing and potentially more useful. In particular, its ability to sort columns arbitrarily and display data over time offers convenience and better visibility of system and application behavior.

Chime can display moving averages and has other options such as record and playback. Most recently it adds support for automatic drilldown.

An important feature of Chime is the ability to add new displays without re-compiling. A display is simply an XML file. Individual displays can be made more flexible by including macro arguments or prompts that function like script options. Placeholders also allow DTrace program values to be substituted behind the scenes, enabling the user of Chime to see more detail about selected items of interest by choosing from a list of drilldown options without having to know about DTrace. The resulting (modified) programs are displayable, making the tool educational as an added benefit. Chime can function as a toolkit of canned displays, but also leverages some of the dynamic potential of DTrace to answer unanticipated questions prompted by the current display. Chime even provides some of the ad hoc capability of dtrace(1M) by allowing you to generate displays directly from the command line using -n or -s to specify a program string or a program file just as you would with the dtrace command:

% /opt/OSOL0chime/bin/chime -ktn 'sysinfo:::readch { @bytes[execname] = sum(arg0); }' -T "Bytes Read"

The above command is from Brendan Gregg's DTrace One Liners, modified to include options for sparklines, a total row, and a title. Generated displays can be saved (-w option), edited in a wizard, documented, and grouped into categories, making them easy to find and run later. Chime now includes a category with many scripts from the DTraceToolkit.

You can get the latest version of Chime here. Please send questions, comments, and bug reports to chime dash discuss at opensolaris dot org (subscribe here, or by sending an empty email to chime dash discuss dash subscribe at opensolaris dot org). This list is also a great way to share displays as attached .xml files. If you create a display, it will be more useful to others if you provide some explanatory text (specified in the longDescription property) to appear in the Chime window when the display is selected.

Blogs

tomee - Chime Automatic Drilldown

Jun 30, 2:05 PM

Bill Rushmore III - Coding Horror and ZFS

May 27, 5:14 AM

I enjoy following Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror blog.  You might be able to guess from the blog title (hint: the book "Code Complete") that he lives in the Microsoft world.  So it was very nice to see ...

Bill Rushmore III - A new bugs.opensolaris.org

May 12, 2:33 PM

Today we launched a new version of bugs.opensolaris.org.   For the past few months I have been supporting this but it was not very practical to make changes since it lived on another group's ...

Bill Rushmore III - Chime Demo

May 1, 11:23 AM

This is my first attempt at a screen cast demo for Chime.  It is a little rough but I think might be helpful to give some ideas of what you can do with Chime.  I had some technical difficulties ...

Bill Rushmore III - Why I still am Optimistic about Sun

Apr 14, 7:40 AM

<!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> If you have been paying attention to the news there has been a lot of talk about Sun. If you believe the ...