Applications running on modern operating systems usually communicate with the underlying OS kernel through system calls (syscalls) or through an intermediate platform API. Some operating systems provide advanced tracing tools to monitor the applications running, and for troubleshooting. Such tools (such as dtrace on Oracle Solaris) allow the user to intercept all application activity, syscalls, Unix signals processing, and so on, to diagnose performance and functional problems.

For proper support of tracing tools, applications should have probe-points (or tracepoints) compiled into their binaries.

SystemTap is a tracing tool and a scripting language for Linux-based operating systems. IcedTea 6 can be built with SystemTap support.