1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /><title xmlns:d="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook">Chapter 1. Introduction</title><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="Common_Content/css/default.css" /><link rel="stylesheet" media="print" href="Common_Content/css/print.css" type="text/css" /><meta xmlns:d="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" name="generator" content="not publican" /><meta xmlns:d="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" name="package" content="" /><link rel="home" href="index.html" title="SystemTap Beginners Guide" /><link rel="up" href="index.html" title="SystemTap Beginners Guide" /><link rel="prev" href="pr01s02.html" title="2. We Need Feedback!" /><link rel="next" href="intro-systemtap-vs-others.html" title="1.2. SystemTap Capabilities" /></head><body><p id="title"></p><ul class="docnav top"><li class="previous"><a accesskey="p" href="pr01s02.html"><strong>Prev</strong></a></li><li class="home">SystemTap Beginners Guide</li><li class="next"><a accesskey="n" href="intro-systemtap-vs-others.html"><strong>Next</strong></a></li></ul><div class="chapter"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h1 class="title"><a id="introduction"> </a>Chapter 1. Introduction</h1></div></div></div><div class="toc"><dl class="toc"><dt><span class="section"><a href="introduction.html#goals">1.1. Documentation Goals</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="intro-systemtap-vs-others.html">1.2. SystemTap Capabilities</a></span></dt><dt><span class="section"><a href="intro-systemtap-limitations.html">1.3. Limitations of SystemTap</a></span></dt></dl></div><a id="id1346" class="indexterm"></a><a id="id1347" class="indexterm"></a><div class="para"> SystemTap is a tracing and probing tool that allows users to study and monitor the activities of the computer system (particularly, the kernel) in fine detail. It provides information similar to the output of tools like <code class="command">netstat</code>, <code class="command">ps</code>, <code class="command">top</code>, and <code class="command">iostat</code>, but is designed to provide more filtering and analysis options for collected information. </div><div class="section"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a id="goals"> </a>1.1. Documentation Goals</h2></div></div></div><a id="id1348" class="indexterm"></a><a id="id1349" class="indexterm"></a><a id="id1350" class="indexterm"></a><a id="id1351" class="indexterm"></a><div class="para">SystemTap provides the infrastructure to monitor the running Linux kernel for detailed analysis. This can assist administrators and developers in identifying the underlying cause of a bug or performance problem.</div><div class="para">Without SystemTap, monitoring the activity of a running kernel would require a tedious instrument, recompile, install, and reboot sequence. SystemTap is designed to eliminate this and allows users to gather the same information by running user-written SystemTap scripts.</div><div class="para">SystemTap was initially designed for users with intermediate to advanced knowledge of the kernel. As a consequence, it is less useful to administrators or developers with limited knowledge of and experience with the Linux kernel. Moreover, much of the existing SystemTap documentation is aimed at knowledgeable and experienced users, which makes learning the tool similarly difficult.</div><div class="para">To lower these barriers, the SystemTap Beginners Guide was written with the following goals:</div><div xmlns:d="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" class="itemizedlist"><ul><li class="listitem"><div class="para">to introduce users to SystemTap, familiarize them with its architecture, and provide setup instructions;</div></li><li class="listitem"><div class="para">to provide pre-written SystemTap scripts for monitoring detailed activity in different components of the system, along with instructions on how to run them and analyze their output.</div></li></ul></div></div></div><ul class="docnav"><li class="previous"><a accesskey="p" href="pr01s02.html"><strong>Prev</strong>2. We Need Feedback!</a></li><li class="up"><a accesskey="u" href="#"><strong>Up</strong></a></li><li class="home"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html"><strong>Home</strong></a></li><li class="next"><a accesskey="n" href="intro-systemtap-vs-others.html"><strong>Next</strong>1.2. SystemTap Capabilities</a></li></ul></body></html>
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