DTrace
Hacker ApprovedThe most recommended of 3 tracing tools
Kernel-level tracing tool people praise for seeing whole systems; on macOS it needs SIP disabled and Apple support has lagged.
Kernel-level tracing tool people praise for seeing whole systems; on macOS it needs SIP disabled and Apple support has lagged.
16 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 12
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 75%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 12 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Long seen as a major innovation
“there was always an alternative that no one took: dtrace”
Comment from 7 Nov 2025 in “OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel” “DTrace and ZFS were great innovations”
Comment from 21 Sep 2026 in “What Sun got wrong” “Zones, DTrace was the rest.”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “illumos” Traces across the whole stack
“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.”
Comment from 21 Sep 2026 in “What Sun got wrong” “DTrace, for example, is a tool to use AOP with programs and/or the OS kernel that makes the normal cases trivial”
Comment from 30 Jun 2026 in “The Return of Aspect Oriented Programming” Well integrated with other Unix tools
“Jails, ZFS, pf, bhyve, Dtrace are very well integrated with eachother”
Comment from 1 Dec 2025 in “A Love Letter to FreeBSD” “besides this, there's also dtrace, pf, etc”
Comment from 21 Feb 2026 in “macOS's Little-Known Command-Line Sandboxing Tool”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Needs SIP disabled on macOS
“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.”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Strace-macOS: A clone of the strace command for macOS” “Considering you need to turn off SIP to use it, I would not recommend using DTrace in prod”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Strace-macOS: A clone of the strace command for macOS” “crippling DTrace with SIP”
Comment from 8 Feb 2026 in “Why E cores make Apple Silicon fast”
Other tracing tools people recommend
The two most recommended other tracing tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 3 tracing tools, rankedWhat people said
15 of the 18 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“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.”
“DTrace and ZFS were great innovations”
“they are very close to perfect, and require minimal changes”
“DTrace, for example, is a tool to use AOP with programs and/or the OS kernel that makes the normal cases trivial”
“besides this, there's also dtrace, pf, etc”
“crippling DTrace with SIP”
“Zones, DTrace was the rest.”
“this would be much easier to implement than DTrace self-hosted in a running kernel”
“Jails, ZFS, pf, bhyve, Dtrace are very well integrated with eachother”
“Considering you need to turn off SIP to use it, I would not recommend using DTrace in prod”
“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.”
“it seems largely unmaintained”
“We should be using USDTs to emit trace ids that can be consumed by dtrace”
“there was always an alternative that no one took: dtrace”
“parse fs events from bcc and libdtrace with python would be great”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.