As a DevOps/SRE/Sysadmin, have you ever been woken up by system issues in the middle of the night, and after combing through logs, still can’t see the root cause, and neither does restarting the service doesn’t help. You’re left thinking, “What on earth is actually wrong?!” What’s your next step then?
This is where bpftrace, a Linux tracing tool built upon the powerful eBPF technology, comes in handy. It can be viewed as a more powerful version of tools like strace, tcpdump, or iotop. It allows you to observe behavior across all components of the system (from kernel to applications) in real-time and with low overhead, helping you gain deep insights into exactly what the system is doing when problems occur. Whether you need to trace the latency distribution of specific syscalls, observe disk I/O activity, or what TCP connections are undergoing problem, bpftrace enables you to quickly get to the core of the issue using its concise syntax, all with minimal impact on system performance.