IOP Systems Co-founder Discusses eBPF-based Telemetry and Low-Overhead Metrics

Introduction to Rezolus and metriken

Brian Martin, co-founder of IOP Systems, introduced two open-source projects: Rezolus and metriken. IOP Systems originated from Twitter's infrastructure performance team. Rezolus is a systems performance telemetry agent that uses eBPF, while metriken is a low-overhead metrics library.

Rezolus: eBPF-based Telemetry

Rezolus heavily utilizes eBPF to gather instrumentation from the Linux kernel, enabling dynamic probing for fine-grained metrics. Beyond basic CPU, network, and disk metrics, Rezolus can instrument the scheduler, syscall paths, and the TCP stack. It offers Prometheus exposition for telemetry consumption and is available on GitHub.

metriken: Low-Overhead Metrics Library

metriken is a metrics library optimized for performance-critical paths, used across projects like RPC-Perf, Pelikan, and Rezolus. It employs a link-time technique to discover and aggregate metrics from instrumented libraries within an application.

Understanding eBPF

eBPF, or Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, allows sandboxed programs to run within the Linux kernel. This capability enables observation of kernel behavior without requiring code changes to the kernel itself. eBPF can attach to kernel functions, tracepoints, and user space functions, sharing data back to user space via BPF maps.

Importance of Instrumentation

The presentation emphasizes that instrumentation is crucial for gaining visibility into system operations. Tools like Rezolus and metriken provide the necessary data to understand and optimize system performance.