Context: How eBPF Sets the Stage for Superior Container Monitoring

How eBPF Sets the Stage for Superior Container Monitoring

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and views from the cloud native community. This week, we discuss the use of the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) to improve container monitoring.

For this discussion we are joined by Daniella Pontes, who is the senior manager of product marketing at InfluxData, and by Luca Deri, founder of the ntop network monitoring tool. Deri and InfluxData have partnered to produce a container monitoring tool, based on eBPF, ntop and the Influx DB time-series database system.

Pontes and Deri wrote about this new project in a recent post for TNS, “IT Monitoring in the Era of Containers: Tapping into eBPF Observability.” In the world of containers and microservices, they write, monitoring services from the outside only doesn’t work. Instead, IT teams should read system metrics directly to gain insight into the activities inside and between the containers themselves. eBPF is one way to get system information about the workload running on the container.

In the second half of the show, we discuss the latest news and podcasts on The New Stack. We highlighted a recent podcast recorded with VMware’s Bryan Liles and Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Dan Kohn about sustaining open source communities. We discuss the recently-released Nats 2.0, Box’s move to microservices through Kubernetes and GitOps, and the HashiCorp’s Consul being extended to become a full-service mesh. We also discuss the IBM acquisition of Red Hat.

Libby Clark, who is the editorial and marketing director at TNS, hosted this podcast, with the help of Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, and Joab Jackson, managing editor at The New Stack.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, InfluxDB,  The Linux Foundation, Red Hat, and VMware are sponsors of The New Stack.

Feature photo by Harry Grout on Unsplash.