BPF Performance Tools

BPF and related observability tools give software professionals unprecedented visibility into software, helping them analyze operating system and application performance, troubleshoot code, and strengthen security. BPF Performance Tools: Linux System and Application Observability is the industry's most comprehensive guide to using these tools for observability. Brendan Gregg, author of the industry's definitive guide to system performance, introduces powerful new methods and tools for doing analysis that leads to more robust, reliable, and safer code.
This authoritative guide:

• Explores a wide spectrum of software and hardware targets
• Thoroughly covers open source BPF tools from the Linux Foundation iovisor project's bcc and bpftrace repositories
• Summarizes performance engineering and kernel internals you need to understand
• Provides and discusses 150+ bpftrace tools, including 80 written specifically for this book: tools you can run as-is, without programming -- or customize and develop further, using diverse interfaces and the bpftrace front-end

You'll learn how to use BPF (eBPF) tracing tools to analyze CPUs, memory, disks, file systems, networking, languages, applications, containers, hypervisors, security, and the Linux kernel. You'll move from basic to advanced tools and techniques, producing new metrics, stack traces, custom latency histograms, and more. It's like having a superpower: with Gregg's guidance and tools, you can analyze virtually everything that impacts system performance, so you can improve virtually any Linux operating system or application.

Brendan Gregg is a senior performance engineer at Netflix and a major contributor to BPF (eBPF), leading its use for observability. He has spent 15 years using BPF and earlier tracers in production environments, has published widely about his work, and has taught performance analysis worldwide. He was primary author of DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD, and author of the best-selling Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud. For five years, he has been focused on BPF tracing. He has helped to develop and maintain the main BPF front-ends, bcc and bpftrace, for which he created reference guides, tutorials, and 70+ new BPF performance analysis tools, plus another 80 for this book.