As an application increases in complexity, observing it in action becomes more difficult. Traditional tools are not very useful when moving across programming languages. DTrace is a revolutionary tool that allows you to observe applications in AMP stack and those written in languages such as PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, C, and C++.

This video tutorial demonstrates techniques for using this dynamic framework to trace the behavior of applications at runtime on Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X. It's ideal for administrators, developers, and service personnel -- whether you're a beginning, intermediate, or advanced user of DTrace.

• Beginners -- If you're new to DTrace, you get an overview of fundamentals. You'll learn how to use DTrace to observe scripting languages, and watch as an application built with a typical AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack is observed and optimized.
• Experienced users -- Learn how to create user-land statically defined tracing (USDT) probes in Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE platform) release 7.0 applications.
• Advanced users -- Learn about using the Java and C APIs for DTrace.

"Observing and Optimizing your Application with DTrace" captures one of the popular tutorial sessions presented at OSCON 2010, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention held in Portland, Oregon, in July. Other videos of OSCON 2010 sessions include:

• Automated Infrastructure is on the Menu with Chef
• Building a NoSQL Data Cloud
• Cooking with jQuery
• Django Deployment Workshop
• Hands-on Cassandra
• Introduction to Django
• Practical Python Programming: Callbacks
• The Productive Programmer
• Scalable Internet Architectures
• Test-Driven Database Development
• The Seductions of Scala

1. Observing and Optimizing your Application with DTrace Part 1 49 minutes  
2. Observing and Optimizing your Application with DTrace Part 2 34 minutes