IISWC Tutorial 2025(October 12, 2025)

Observability into Application-level Metrics with eBPF

To provide greater insight into the complex behavior of modern data centers, non-invasive tools for observability have become increasingly important for data center management and optimization. Observability tools aim to collect various telemetry and measurements of various data center components, such as metrics (bandwidth utilization, memory utilization, etc.), logs, or distributed traces of applications. The emergence of eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) has revolutionized observability and monitoring tools in the Linux ecosystem. eBPF allows the execution of custom programs in a secure, in-kernel virtual machine, thus providing a unique vantage point for monitoring system-level activities.

Many observability tools have been built with eBPF to provide observability for security, networking activity, container activity, and monitoring of distributed infrastructures, such as Kubernetes. While eBPF has historically been used to provide observability in distributed infrastructures, the use of eBPF to guide management within a single server is not well explored.

Goal

This tutorial will introduce the eBPF framework and demonstrate how eBPF can provide observability into data center workloads to guide server management runtimes. The tutorial will include lectures and hands-on demonstrations on the eBPF framework, how to develop eBPF programs for observability, how to interface userspace code with eBPF, and how eBPF-based tools can be used for various server management runtimes.

Audience

This tutorial is intended for engineers and researchers with a background in systems programming and a general understanding of Linux and networking. No prior experience with eBPF is required.

Requirements

Pre-requisites

• Familiarity with Linux and the command line.
• Basic understanding of how servers and data centers operate.
• Familiarity with tools like ssh, git, and general system administration tasks.

Slides

The slides of the tutorial can be accessed here.

Schedule

Time (PST)	Session Details	Speaker
9:00 am	Welcome Statement	Daniel Wong
9:10 am	Intro to eBPF and Env Setup	Mohammadreza Rezvani
9:30 am	eBPF “Hello World”	Mohammadreza Rezvani
10:00 am	Intro to Server-Client Workloads	Muntaka Ibnath
10:20 am	Coffee Break
10:40 am	Tracing syscalls using kprobes	Muntaka Ibnath
11:00 am	Tracing user-space functions using uprobes	Muntaka Ibnath
11:30 am	Observability into Application-Level Metrics	Daniel Wong
11:50 am	Closing Statement	Daniel Wong