One of the most useful toolkit which gives Sun Solaris a bit of an edge in system administration is DTrace. DTrace toolkit is a collection of scripts which help a Solaris system administrator to do an extensive check of the system , track down performance problems across many layers of software and tune the performance of the running processes. Dtrace has been built using the D programming language which has a lot of semblance with awk.
Work had been going on in porting this toolkit to FreeBSD. And now John Birrell and his team who have been working on this project claim to have reached a major milestone in porting this rather powerful toolkit to FreeBSD. The basic DTrace infrastructure is in place and of the 1039 DTrace tests that Sun runs on Solaris, 793 now pass on FreeBSD.
Linux system administrators do not have the luxury of such a powerful integrated toolkit and have to do with a small number of individual programs to achieve some of those tasks. Too bad, DTrace has been released under CDDL licence. Else someone would have started a project to port DTrace to Linux too by now.
