This time I sat down with Henrik Rexed, CNCF Ambassador and Staff Engineer at Dynatrace. Henrik is also the voice behind the popular blog Is It Observable and brings deep expertise from a career spent largely in performance engineering.

Here’s what we covered:

* What does a CNCF Ambassador actually do?

It turns out the role is less about status and more about survival for open-source projects. The goal is simple: help the community navigate a landscape flooded with new tools and ensure worthy projects actually get adopted.

* When “CPU Usage” tells you nothing

From European League live streams to GPS trackers on police cars in the desert, simulating massive loads used to be the only way to understand system limits. But simply knowing a CPU is “waiting” isn’t enough. Is it waiting on disk? On the network? We discussed why traditional observability fail in modern architectures and how eBPF provides the missing context.

* Is eBPF always the answer?

It’s tempting to rewrite everything in eBPF, but is it always necessary? Dynatrace takes a “tactical” approach. Forcing eBPF onto legacy bare-metal systems with old kernels creates a maintenance nightmare. The argument here is for a hybrid model: use eBPF only where the environment (like Kubernetes) is controlled enough to support it safely.

* The “Cross Your Fingers” Deployment

We deploy network policies in Kubernetes or Istio, but do we actually know what they are doing? There is a frustrating gap in observability: when a connection fails, was it the policy or the network? Right now, most of us are just guessing.

* Security: To block or to listen?

If a process acts up, should you kill it immediately? Aggressive blocking often causes more problems than it solves, especially if dependencies break. We discuss the alternative: using “honeypots” and fake tokens to let attackers reveal themselves before you take action—learning the behavior rather than just stopping the process.

I’ll leave it at that. Hope you enjoy it 🐝

Get full access to eBPFChirp at ebpfchirp.substack.com/subscribe