Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition

Solaris 2 Native Metric Interfaces

Solaris 2 provides many interfaces to supply performance and status metrics. The SE Toolkit provides a convenient way to get at the data and use it, but if you want to implement your own measurement code, you need to know how to program to the interfaces directly from C code. Richard Pettit, the author of the SE language, contributed the following sections that explain how to program to the “kvm,” “kstat,” “mib”, and “ndd” interfaces used by SE. I added information on processes, trace probes, the rstat protocol, and configuration information.