If you browse some of the _example.txt files in https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/tree/master/tools https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/tree/master/tools , you'll see i

If you browse some of the _example.txt files in https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/tree/master/tools https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/tree/master/tools , you'll see it's solving the same problems we used to solve with DTrace, plus a few extra. Here's a couple of the ZFS examples (since we're talking ZFS): # ./zfsslower Tracing ZFS operations slower than 10 ms TIME COMM PID T BYTES OFF_KB LAT(ms) FILENAME 06:31:28 dd 25570 W 131072 38784 303.92 data1 06:31:34 dd 25686 W 131072 38784 388.28 data1 06:31:35 dd 25686 W 131072 78720 519.66 data1 06:31:35 dd 25686 W 131072 116992 405.94 data1 06:31:35 dd 25686 W 131072 153600 433.52 data1 [...] # ./zfsdist Tracing ZFS operation latency... Hit Ctrl-C to end. ^C operation = 'read' usecs : count distribution 0 -> 1 : 0 | | 2 -> 3 : 0 | | 4 -> 7 : 4479 |****************************************| 8 -> 15 : 1028 |********* | 16 -> 31 : 14 | | 32 -> 63 : 1 | | 64 -> 127 : 2 | | 128 -> 255 : 6 | | 256 -> 511 : 1 | | 512 -> 1023 : 1256 |*********** | 1024 -> 2047 : 9 | | 2048 -> 4095 : 1 | | 4096 -> 8191 : 2 | | [...] The current BPF interface we're using (bcc) is Python for the frontend, and C for the backend. It's currently much more verbose than DTrace, and involves writing 10x the lines of code. For some immediate use cases at Netflix, that's not a big problem, as staff will be using BPF via a GUI (Vector), not writing these tools directly. There's also high level features it's still missing (like tracepoints and sampling), so what will be in Ubuntu 14.04 won't do everything, but it will do a fair amount: most of those _example.txt's. Some use a newer BPF interface (linux 4.5), and we've been putting the legacy versions in an /old directory specifically for Ubuntu 16.04 users.