Sun Microsystems, Inc. offers a very interesting tool originally designed to identify and explore online application performance. That tool is known as DTrace, and as its name implies, performs "dynamic tracing" of what might be thought of as application workflows. To quote from Wikipedia, "DTrace is designed for tuning and troubleshooting of applications and the OS itself, giving its user operational insights with which they can make performance gains. Special consideration has been taken to make it safe to use in a production environment."
That latter sentence is particularly interesting. Folks from Sun describe DTrace as capable of automatically "instrumenting" itself to deliver the desired information. That means that you "point" DTrace at something, and it "automagically" figures out how to go to that something and configure itself in a way to extract the desired information, without materially affecting performance. Other tools used for so-called "root-cause analysis" can take hours or days to track down and identify specific causes of performance problems, even after you've spent the time and money to obtain or build and deploy the "right" probe or monitoring tool.
In addition, DTrace supports a programming language, known imaginatively enough as "D," a kind-of successor to/subset of the venerable C language. This means one could write scripts that instruct DTrace to obtain and present a wide range of information that can help to improve IT performance, process-related knowledge, or, optimally, both.
All well and good, but what's that got to do with BPM?
Well, suppose you can point a software "lens" at any or every part of a particular application or service and determine not only how it's performing, but what people are doing with it. With such information, you'd know a fair amount of information that could be very useful to defining, managing, and refining business processes. And if you could write programs for such a lens, you could perform all kinds of useful analysis and monitoring tasks repeatedly and consistently, generating historical and trending information about behavior that drives real-life business processes.
No wonder the Wall Street Journal awarded DTrace top prize in its 2006 Technology Innovation Awards competition. It came in ahead of innovative lightweight solar energy panels, and powdered insulin that can be inhaled instead of injected!
DTrace has its shortcomings, however. First of all, to do what it does requires tight integration with the kernel or heart of an operating system – in this case, Sun's own Solaris 10. However, DTrace was the very first component of OpenSolaris Sun made available under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in 2005. Sun claims more than 7 million downloads of OpenSolaris, which means a fairly large number of folks are building DTrace-enabled problem-solving and process-managing solutions even as you read this.
There is also work going on to port DTrace to the Unix-derived FreeBSD open source operating system. In addition, Apple Inc. announced last year that an upcoming release of its OS X environment will have DTrace built in as well. (Bryan Cantrill, one of the creators of DTrace, suggested to IBM Corp. back in August 2006 that IBM support development of DTrace for IBM's AIX operating environment. He made some cogent, customer-centric arguments for it, too. No word yet on any reply.)
So you will likely be able to take at least some advantage of DTrace soon in your own environment, even if you're not knowingly running Solaris. Whether or not this is true, though, I suggest you investigate DTrace and its growing ecosystem. I think the exercise could help to provide a template or wish list for the kinds of information you can and should extract from your IT infrastructure to drive your business processes.
Some good starting places include the DTrace OpenSolaris Community, and the DTrace section of Sun's BigAdmin Web site on systems administration. These contain oodles of links to discussions, downloads, information, and other resources. Meanwhile, make sure to tune in here for Part 2, wherein I will provide glimpses of an interesting, potentially bright, BPM-enabling future for DTrace and IT infrastructure management!
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
