For those who don't know what a kstat is, it's a Solaris kernel statistic. There are a lot of these, and they give you an awful lot of information about what you Solaris system is doing.
JKstat allows you to get at the kstats from a Java application. (Solaris already includes a fabulous perl implementation. One day, I hope JKstat will be as good. It isn't yet.)
The kstats naturally form a tree structure, and I've written a graphical browser that allows you to go through the kstat tree. Like so:
(Oh dear, what has blogger done to my beautiful image? Oh well - click on it and you'll see the real thing!)
There's still a lot to be done. For one thing, I want to actually create a decent API rather than the horrible kludge that I'm using at the moment (it's this, rather than any lack of maturity or functionality, that keeps the version number at a lowly 0.07). And there are a number of existing tools that could be enhanced by a decent graphical user interface (in particular, the ability to dynamically expand or compress certain features - imagine iostat with the ability to zoom in on specific disks and show or hide the partition data on the fly). Looking further ahead, one can imagine integration with dtrace to answer the question "what is causing this activity?".
Enjoy, and if you have any comments (and, in particular, you would like a graphical display of a particular kstat, or can think of novel and useful ways of displaying kstat data) I would love to hear them.
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