Brendan Gregg

Brendan Gregg is a computer engineer known for his work on computing performance. He works for Intel,^[1] and previously worked at Netflix, Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation, and Joyent. He was born in Newcastle, New South Wales and graduated from the University of Newcastle, Australia.

Brendan Gregg
Brendan Gregg speaking at ZFS Day, Oct 2, 2012, San Francisco.
Born	Newcastle, New South Wales
Occupation(s)	Computer scientist and computer engineer
Known for	USE method, eBPF, DTraceToolkit
Website	www.brendangregg.com

In November, 2013, he was awarded the LISA Outstanding Achievement Award "For contributions to the field of system administration, particularly groundbreaking work in systems performance analysis methodologies."^[2] He investigates and writes about Linux performance on his blog.^[3]

Contributions

Gregg has developed various methodologies for performance analysis, notably the USE Method methodology (short for Utilization Saturation and Errors Method).^[4]

He has also created visualization types to aid performance analysis, including latency heat maps,^[5] utilization heat maps, subsecond offset heat maps, and flame graphs.^[6]

His tools are included in multiple operating systems and products, and are in use by companies worldwide. He pioneered eBPF as an observability technology,^[7] including authoring many advanced eBPF tracing tools to provide unique insights into system behavior. As a kernel engineer, he developed the ZFS L2ARC: A pioneering file system performance technology. He has also developed and delivered professional training courses on computer performance.

Gregg has authored hundreds of articles about systems performance and multiple technical books, including Systems Performance 2nd Edition (2020) and BPF Performance Tools (2019), both in the Addison-Wesley professional computing series. His prior books were on Solaris performance and DTrace, and were published by Prentice Hall. His books are recommended or required reading at major technology companies.

Gregg was previously known as an expert on using DTrace and the creator of the DTraceToolkit.^[8] He is also the star of the Shouting in the Data Center viral video.^[9]

Publications

• — (December 2020). Systems Performance, Second edition. ISBN 978-0136820154.
• — (December 2019). BPF Performance Tools. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0136554820.
• — (May 2016). "The Flame Graph". Communications of the ACM. 59 (6). Association for Computing Machinery: 48–57. doi:10.1145/2909476. ISSN 0001-0782. S2CID 13918204. Retrieved 16 October 2021.
• — (April 2014). "The Case of the Clumsy Kernel". ;login:. 39 (2). USENIX: 21–25. ISSN 1044-6397. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
• — (October 2013). Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud. Pearson Education. ISBN 978-0133390094.

• — (February 2013). "Thinking Methodically About Performance". Communications of the ACM. 56 (2): 45–51. doi:10.1145/2408776.2408791. S2CID 18218617. Retrieved 17 March 2013. (detail link)
• Brendan Gregg; Jim Mauro (2011). DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-209151-0.
• — (July 2010). "Visualizing System Latency". Communications of the ACM. 53 (7): 48–54. doi:10.1145/1785414.1785435. Retrieved 31 January 2012.
• Richard McDougall; Jim Mauro; Brendan Gregg (2006). Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris. Sun Microsystems Press/Prentice Hall. ISBN 0131568191.