OpenSolaris

1. Project: Chime Visualization Tool for DTrace
   1. Installation
   2. Change Log
      1. Known Issues
   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

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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.

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 drilldown on selected data from a list of breakdown 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 Python Category

Dec 19, 7:45 PM

I just added a Python category to Chime , in addition to the Ruby category added earlier. A PHP category is coming soon. These are all scripts from the DTraceToolkit . Chime has gotten pretty ...

tomee - Chime Data Scrolling

Dec 16, 2:29 PM

As I was scrolling through output of the dtrace command recently, it struck me that the command line allowed me to do something I could not do with Chime : look back at recent data. It bothered me to ...

Bill Rushmore III - What's new in OpenSolaris 2008.11?

Dec 3, 4:41 AM

Check out this screen cast from Roman Strobl to learn about what is new in OpenSolaris 2008.11: http://webcast-west.sun.com/interactive/09B12437/index.html

Bill Rushmore III - Hello World: Sunstorage7000

Nov 10, 6:00 AM

Just in time for Christmas is the Sunstorage 7000 .  It might not be on every kids Christmas list but I can tell you that the OpenSolaris.org infrastructure team has been anxiously awaiting this and ...

Bill Rushmore III - OpenSolaris, Now with Emacs!

Oct 31, 12:10 PM

Emacs is now in the pkg.opensolaris.org image packaging system.  So if you run OpenSolaris you don't need to build it yourself,  just open up the Package Manager and download the Emacs packages.