4. Observability Tools
Operating systems have historically provided many tools for observing system software and hardware components. To the newcomer, the wide range of available tools suggested that everything—or at least everything important—could be observed. In reality, there were many gaps, and systems performance experts became skilled in the art of inference and interpretation: figuring out activity from indirect tools and statistics.
For example, network packets could be examined individually (sniffing), but disk I/O could not (at least, not remotely easily). Conversely, disk utilization (percent busy) was easily observable from operating system tools, but network interface utilization was not.
With the addition of tracing frameworks, ...
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