This command captures a sequential flow of time-stamped system events. The trace is a valuable tool for observing system and application execution.
While many of the other tools provide high level statistics such as CPU and I/O utilization, the trace facility helps expand the information about where the events happened, which process is responsible, when the events took place, and how they are affecting the system. The curt postprocessing tool can extract information from the trace. It provides statistics on CPU utilization and process and thread activity. Another postprocessing tool is splat, the Simple Performance Lock Analysis Tool. This tool is used to analyze lock activity in the AIX® kernel and kernel extensions for simple locks.