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 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.