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I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on eBPF generally, it seems likely that this is where observability companies are headed. It's non-trivial to implement bu
by thejonanshow 6y ago
I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on eBPF generally, it seems likely that this is where observability companies are headed. It's non-trivial to implement but monitoring from the kernel layer makes so much sense that I expect the tooling will come along quickly.
- dan-buzzkill 6y agoeBPF is great but it only works for linux and access to the kernel layer doesn't work for serverless environments, so it's definitely a piece of the puzzle but not a silver bullet IMO.
- zasgar 6y agoCo-founder/CEO of Pixie here. eBPF is indeed a part of the puzzle. It allows us to access telemetry data without any manual instrumentation when running on Linux machines. Pixie itself is extendable and currently ingests data from many other sources as well. Joining forces with New Relic will allow us to focus on expanding the open-source project, but also expand our capabilities by plugging into other open APIs and frameworks such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus.
- pstuart 6y agoI caught your presentation to GoSF a couple weeks ago -- it was very impressive and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to apply lessons learned from that. https://github.com/pixie-labs/pixie/tree/main/demos/simple-gotracing/trace_example https://github.com/pixie-labs/pixie/tree/main/demos/simple-g... p.s. The slides would be nice to have too :-)
- zasgar 6y agoThanks for attending the talk: Slides: https://www2.slideshare.net/ZainAsgar/no-instrumentation-golang-logging-with-ebpf-gosf-talk-111120 https://www2.slideshare.net/ZainAsgar/no-instrumentation-gol... Write up: https://blog.pixielabs.ai/ebpf-http-tracing/ https://blog.pixielabs.ai/ebpf-http-tracing/ https://blog.pixielabs.ai/ebpf-function-tracing/post/ https://blog.pixielabs.ai/ebpf-function-tracing/post/
- ed_elliott_asc 6y agoHi, Why do you need the kernel support if you modify the binaries, why not insert a function to write your logs and then insert a call to that function rather than relying on kernel support via an int 3? Curious really.
- serbrech 6y agoperformance, plus lower level metrics that tell you about the health of the system/host, disregarding what software is running.
- xiphias2 6y agoIs there any technical reason why it couldn't work with serverless?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoBecause serverless still needs to run on a machine, and that machine is typically at least one of 1. shared with other users, in which case giving you kernel access would be a security issue, or 2. ephemeral (firecracker VM or such) in which case eBPF is... technically possible, but not nearly as useful (you go from "this server has had X events of type Y over the last 24 hours" to "this VM had X events happen in the 590ms before it was destroyed").
- xiphias2 6y agoI see, I thought it could be used for some simple thing, like a load balancer / proxy with a bit of logic in it, but I guess it's too constrainted to do something useful as a server
- throwaway894345 6y agoWhat's the advantage of monitoring from the kernel layer? It's not jumping out at me...
- SEJeff 6y agoTracing from user to kernel back to userspace in one single pane of glass. Have you never heard anyone hype about DTrace on Solaris? This allows building similar things on production systems with little to no impact on running production applications.
- suthakamal 6y agohadn't thought of this like DTrace. Thx for that!
- SEJeff 6y agoAnytime! eBPF is Linux’s equivalent of DTrace
- cyphar 6y agoStrictly speaking, one of the uses of eBPF is a DTrace-like tracing tool but it's also used in quite a few other places (for instance it's also used for devices cgroup policy in cgroupv2).
- SEJeff 6y agoAnd filtering syscalls for seccomp or literally packet filtering. I believe Jens Axboe and team were looking at using eBPF for some of the low level IO subsystems. But I was explaining the most common and obvious (for a user) use of eBPF. They should just look at the io visor project to see some of the stuff that can be done with it (disclaimer, I work with one of the io visor maintainers)
- 0xEFF 6y agodtrace has also been on macOS since 10.5, with a pretty nice GUI app as well. I’ve used it to trace ruby and python code to isolate slow API requests from the end user’s perspective.
- morelisp 6y agoFor hardware management maybe but so much of "observability" in general is at the application layer I can't see BPF displacing anything more than a tiny corner of it. On the other hand - it already is overhauling service meshes, VPNs and firewalls and network security policies, etc. The stuff fly.io is debuting now is probably going to be standard in few years.
- seneca 6y agoStrongly disagree. BPF uprobes allow extremely fine grained tracing of userspace applications, and allow you to programmatically correlate them with kernel level information.
- jeffbee 6y agoSure but it's also terribly expensive. Are you trying to give up 5-10% of your CPU time to observability?
- morelisp 6y agoSure, but "fine-grained tracing" is itself such a small part of observability even if BPF takes over that entire part of the stack it's still nowhere near a complete observability story. This is outside my area of expertise so maybe I'm just missing some deeper insight - and I can see where you're coming from for traditional "throw the artifact over the wall, good luck running it" system operations kind of stuff. Or debugging services in production, which tracing is a key part of - but again just a small part of observability, and one that the rest of your dev process should be actively trying to minimize. If you have any degree of DevOps going on, many key SLIs will much higher-level (p99 of HTTP requests, MB of storage per customer), and I don't see how eBPF addresses that better than existing instrumentation, or in some cases at all.