# DTrace

12 Hacker News commenters recommended DTrace and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Kernel-level tracing tool people praise for seeing whole systems; on macOS it needs SIP disabled and Apple support has lagged.

## Why people recommend it

- Long seen as a major innovation (3 comments): "there was always an alternative that no one took: dtrace" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845889)) "DTrace and ZFS were great innovations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49791147)) "Zones, DTrace was the rest." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46709426))
- Traces across the whole stack (2 comments): "Linux has a disparate iSCSI daemon, lvm+ext4/reiserfs, initd, and probably 20 different tools to learn if you want to grab metrics across the stack like dtrace on Solaris was capable of." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49792877)) "DTrace, for example, is a tool to use AOP with programs and/or the OS kernel that makes the normal cases trivial" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48731124))
- Well integrated with other Unix tools (2 comments): "Jails, ZFS, pf, bhyve, Dtrace are very well integrated with eachother" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46104518)) "besides this, there's also dtrace, pf, etc" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102012))

## What people warn about

- Needs SIP disabled on macOS (3 comments): "Barely supported by Apple these days - in addition to needing to disable SIP which is a pain, it was broken causing system freezes for several major macOS releases." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45977823)) "Considering you need to turn off SIP to use it, I would not recommend using DTrace in prod" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986144)) "crippling DTrace with SIP" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934426))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [strace](https://hackerapproved.com/p/strace.md): 9 recommend
- [bpftrace](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bpftrace.md): 6 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "DTrace", https://hackerapproved.com/p/dtrace/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).