Or,the following steps and images will tell you how this template is constructed, and give you ideas on how it can be customized. You can start right away by choosing 'Open an Existing File.' and using the pre-constructed template available in 'dtrace_all.zip' - see attachments section at bottom of this article. When Instruments first starts, you must make a template choice.

Instruments will be installed to your system drive, in /Developer/Applications/ - run it from there, or from the Xcode application menu item select Open Developer Tool->Instruments (in newer versions of Xcode).

This procedure can easily be adjusted to trace only specific processes and executables, but for our purposes here you will be shown how to monitor CPU and file activity for all processes.

Please use the most up to date version of Xcode for your environment to ensure compatibility.

Please note: Xcode is a very large download and depending on network speeds may take some time to fully download. Double-click 'Xcode.mpkg' and choose the default install. On older versions of Mac OS X distributed on physical media, Xcode will be located in the 'Optional Installs' folder to install from.The Apple Developer site ( - requires registration of a developer account).The Mac App store (in Mac OS X 10.6.8 and later - requires registration with the App Store).Xcode is free and can be obtained via the following means: To install Instruments, you must install Xcode, the Macintosh development tools. Use the fs_usage command line to trace SymDaemon file activity instead. Also, the newer SEP client for Macintosh (as of SEP 12.1 RU4) and SymDaemon process are not visible to Instruments tracing. NOTE: Instruments and the required Xcode installation can be unwieldy. It can log and provide statistics for many application and kernel-level operations. DTrace is a troubleshooting tool available on several Unix-like operating systems, including Mac OS X. 'Instruments' is an application provided by Apple that provides a graphical user interface for the DTrace command-line tool.

Apple developer tools command line