Statistics and tracepoints

As a developer tracepoints sound like a powerful and sexy way to get detailed information on what the kernel is doing. As a sys-admin I already have my head full of how to deal with thousands of other pieces of software, now I have to learn another crazy tool just to get simple counters? And what about gathering long term trends? I'd much rather write a 1 minute cron job that reads a file in sys or proc and dumps a few numbers into RRDTool than writing a more complex application for listening to events from the kernel.

Both methods of gathering stats on things in the kernel are very useful and serve different needs to different people. Not everyone has the privilege of thinking like a kernel developer all the time. :-)