KstatBrowser

Kstatbrowser is a graphical utility to browse through and display the various statistics kept by the Solaris kernel.

An individual kstat is identified by the triplet module:instance:name, and each kstat has a number of individual statistics and belongs to a particular class.

The left panel

The left panel contains three tabs which show a tree view of the available kstats, ordered in different ways. Each node of the tree follows the module:instance:name hierarchy.

Selecting and expanding a node allows you to drill down through the kstat hierarchy. Then, selecting a leaf node will display the relevant statistic.

The right panel

The right panel initially displays some statistics about the available kstats - how many, and a breakdown by module, class, and type.

Selecting a kstat will cause a table showing the names and values of the available statistics to be displayed. The table will update once a second and also show the rate of change of numeric kstats.

As each kstat of type KSTAT_TYPE_RAW needs to be decoded individually, not all raw kstats will have data shown. Further work needs to be done here, but raw kstats are a bad thing and should be discouraged - many could (should) be converted to named kstats.

Some kstats will have a small accessory panel to graph the kstat's values. For example, as all KSTAT_TYPE_IO kstats are of exactly the same form, and all measure I/O, a simple panel showing the current I/O is shown. A similar panel is shown for network statistics, and others could be added.

In the table, if you right-click on a statistics that's a numeric value, you can open up a panel to chart that statistic as a function of time.

The toolbar

The toolbar contains a small number of menus.