Chapter 4
Observability Tools
Operating systems have historically provided many tools for observing system software and hardware components. To the newcomer, the wide range of available tools and metrics suggested that everything—or at least everything important—could be observed. In reality there were many gaps, and systems performance experts became skilled in the art of inference and interpretation: figuring out activity from indirect tools and statistics. For example, network packets could be examined individually (sniffing), but disk I/O could not (at least, not easily).
Observability has greatly improved in Linux thanks to the rise of dynamic tracing tools, including the BPF-based BCC and bpftrace. Dark corners are now illuminated, including ...
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