== Why DTrace does not attract people to Solaris very often

Back when Solaris 10 was fresh and new, DTrace was supposed to be one
of its significant competitive advantages, one of the major things that
made it attractive to system administrators (and organizations). In
practice Solaris 10 got a tepid reception, DTrace included, despite all
of the banging on drums that supporters of Solaris did (and somewhat to
their disbelief, at least in my impression of things). Having now used
DTrace somewhat, I have an opinion on why.

It's pretty simple: 
> DTrace is not really a tool that sysadmins use to fix their own
> problems, it's a mechanism that your support provider and/or OS vendor
> uses to provide support.

(This idea was first expressed by a commentator on [[my entry on why we
haven't taken to DTrace DTraceWhyNot]] and has probably been percolating
in the back of my mind ever since.)

You can certainly use DTrace to write your own diagnostic tools;
after all, [[we did ZFSDTraceScripts]]. But DTrace's almost complete
lack of useful documented tracepoints means that doing this
basically requires that you can read and understand (Open)Solaris
code. Or, to put it another way, you need a [[system programmer
../sysadmin/OperatorsAndSystemProgrammers]]. And system programmers are
now uncommon; most places do not have one around and so will never write
their own DTrace scripts (beyond at most very simple ones).

As for DTrace as a mechanism to help your OS vendor, well, sysadmins and
organizations don't care how OS vendors provide support, just that they
do (or don't). A mechanism to provide diagnostic tools is not a selling
feature; at best, the diagnostic tools themselves are.

(Also, [[as I've sort of written before DTraceProblemEffects]], most
sysadmins don't expect to run into problems.)

The less pleasant way to put this is that people are not attracted to
technologies, they are attracted to solutions to problems. DTrace is a
fine technology but for most places it is not a solution.

(I don't know what Sun's true vision for DTrace was. If they planned
for it to be a serious competitive advantage as opposed to mostly an
internal tool, I think that they dropped the ball badly.)