[_delirium]

I thought that was sort of his point, that you can't? I didn't read it as a DTrace vs. Systemtap discussion, but as an observability-on-SmartOS versus observability-on-Ubuntu discussion. If Ubuntu shipped with DTrace (or it could be easily installed), there'd be no real observability difference.

It's a good point that this is a SmartOS vs. Ubuntu rather than SmartOS vs. all-Linuxes comparison, though.

[nailer]

Running dtrace on Ubuntu is possible: much like SystemTap, it's unsupported and involves lots of messing around.

If someone wrote an article called 'Using dtrace' and wrote about the poor experience they had on Ubuntu it'd be just as (in)valid.

[brendangregg]

Not really; DTrace has never been advertised as a tool for Linux. I've talked about the in-development ports, and that they aren't complete, and that they can panic/freeze systems.

OTOH, SystemTap is advertised as tracing for Linux, and that it's safe for production use. My customers are running Linux, usually Ubuntu, and so I tried using SystemTap.

I wouldn't have written that blog post if the SystemTap homepage simply said: "SystemTap is a tracing tool for RHEL. There are ports in progress for Ubuntu and others, which may panic or freeze systems."

I disagree with the logic for not warning customers of this, and I think it's bad for Red Hat. If the homepage had stated that it's a RHEL tool, those frustrated users would have known to try RHEL, instead of giving up entirely.

[nailer]

If your issue is that SystemTap is advertised as being for Linux but not all distros adopt it, then that really, really doesn't come across from reading your article. At all.