Software Alternatives & Reviews

SystemTap VS DTrace

Compare SystemTap VS DTrace and see what are their differences

SystemTap logo SystemTap

SystemTap provides instrumentation for a live running kernel and user-space applications.

DTrace logo DTrace

DTrace is a performance analysis and troubleshooting tool for Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD.
  • SystemTap Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-05-11
  • DTrace Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-04

SystemTap videos

Product Overviews: Using Systemtap

More videos:

  • Review - RHEL Developers: RHEL SystemTap Overview
  • Review - What is my system doing - Full System Observability with SystemTap

DTrace videos

Dtrace Review

More videos:

  • Review - Dtrace Review
  • Review - !!Con 2016 - Finding out what's really going on, with DTrace! By Colin Jones

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to SystemTap and DTrace)
OS & Utilities
33 33%
67% 67
IDE
33 33%
67% 67
Software Development
31 31%
69% 69
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using SystemTap and DTrace. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, SystemTap seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 3 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

SystemTap mentions (3)

  • What are some tools to create code diagrams/graphs/(static or dynamic) call graphs when analyzing c++ code? Any level of automation would be useful here, but manual editing is also preferred. I see Visual Studio Code Graph but this is an option for Windows mainly. Doxygen, perftools?
    Eclipse seems to have a Callgraph plug-in (for execution traces), although it is based on SystemTap, which is only for Linux. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Valve Did the IMPOSSIBLE... Anti-Cheat on Linux - WAN Show September 24, 2021
    They can use DKMS or their own version of systemtap so not they don't have to release the code. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Frozenbyte are now telling Linux users to use Proton, even for their older games
    Since these are kernel anticheats I don't know how they're going to make it work though. Maybe BE and EAC will ship signed code that Valve lets run outside of the Win32 environment, possibly just as the root user or with their own version of systemtap to get into the kernel. Source: almost 3 years ago

DTrace mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of DTrace yet. Tracking of DTrace recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing SystemTap and DTrace, you can also consider the following products

ftrace - A function tracer for the Linux kernel.

OllyDbg - OllyDbg is a 32-bit assembler level analysing debugger.

perf - Perf is a simple app monitoring solution paired with meaningful alerts.

strace - Trace system calls and signals. A diagnostic, debugging and instructional userspace utility.

X64dbg - X64dbg is a debugging software that can debug x64 and x32 applications.

ktap - A script-based dynamic tracing tool for Linux.