Brendan Gregg

Brendan Gregg
Gregg speaking at ZFS Day, 2 October 2012, San Francisco
Born	Newcastle, New South Wales
Occupation	Computer engineer
Known for	USE method, eBPF, DTraceToolkit
Website	www.brendangregg.com

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

In November 2013, he received the LISA Outstanding Achievement Award from USENIX "for contributions to the field of system administration, particularly groundbreaking work in systems performance analysis methodologies." ^[2]

Contributions

Gregg developed the USE Method (Utilization, Saturation, and Errors), a methodology for performance analysis of system resources. ^[3]

He created several visualization types for performance analysis, including latency heat maps ^[4] and flame graphs. ^[5] His flame graph visualization was the subject of a paper in Communications of the ACM . ^[6]

He pioneered eBPF as an observability technology, ^[7] authoring eBPF tracing tools included in multiple operating systems. As a kernel engineer at Sun Microsystems, he developed the ZFS L2ARC, a caching layer for the ZFS file system. He was previously known as an expert on DTrace and created the DTraceToolkit. ^[8]

Publications

• Gregg, Brendan (December 2020). Systems Performance (2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley. ISBN   978-0-13-682015-4.
• Gregg, Brendan (December 2019). BPF Performance Tools. Addison-Wesley. ISBN   978-0-13-655482-0.
• Gregg, Brendan (February 2013). "Thinking Methodically About Performance". Communications of the ACM . 56 (2): 45–51. doi:10.1145/2408776.2408791. S2CID   18218617.
• Gregg, Brendan (July 2010). "Visualizing System Latency". Communications of the ACM . 53 (7): 48–54. doi: 10.1145/1785414.1785435 .
• Gregg, Brendan; Mauro, Jim (2011). DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. Prentice Hall. ISBN   978-0-13-209151-0.
• McDougall, Richard; Mauro, Jim; Gregg, Brendan (2006). Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris. Sun Microsystems Press/Prentice Hall. ISBN   0-13-156819-1.

Patents

• USpatent 8881279B2,Brendan D. Gregg,"Systems and methods for zone-based intrusion detection",issued 4 November 2014, assigned to Joyent, Inc. 
• USpatent 8032708,Brendan D. Gregg, Adam H. Leventhal, Bryan M. Cantrill,"Method and system for caching data in a storage system",issued 4 October 2011, assigned to Oracle America, Inc. 

References

1. Brendan Gregg. "Bio". brendangregg.com. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
2. "LISA Outstanding Achievement Award". USENIX Association. 10 November 2013. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
3. Gregg, Brendan. "The USE Method". brendangregg.com. Retrieved 6 July 2018.
4. Jackson, Joab (28 June 2010). "Oracle engineer reveals latency mysteries with heat maps". Network World. Archived from the original on 9 November 2013. Retrieved 9 November 2013.
5. Jackson, Joab (8 November 2013). "Flame graph shows computer system performance in a new light". PC World. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
6. Gregg, Brendan (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.
7. "Facebook, Google, Isovalent, Microsoft and Netflix Launch eBPF Foundation as Part of the Linux Foundation". Linux Foundation. 12 August 2021. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
8. Brendan Gregg. "DTraceToolkit". brendangregg.com. Retrieved 5 March 2026.

External links

• Official website
• "Interview with Brendan Gregg, winner of the 2013 LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration". USENIX. 12 November 2013.