Linux Performance & Observability Handbook

Modern Linux systems power cloud-native apps, containers, and microservices at scale. Performance and reliability hinge on observability: metrics, logs, traces, and eBPF. With tooling like Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Elastic, perf, strace, ftrace, Flame Graphs, bpftrace/BCC, XDP, and Kubernetes-native signals, engineers can pinpoint latency, eliminate bottlenecks, and ship confidently whether on Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, Alpine, or across AWS, Azure, GCP.

Written in a practitioner-first style by engineers who operate production Linux daily, this handbook distills proven playbooks for SREs, DevOps, platform engineers, site operators, and performance analysts. Every technique favors prod-safe defaults, low overhead, and reproducible workflows.

Linux Performance & Observability Handbook: Diagnose and Optimize Linux Systems with Metrics, Logs, Traces, and eBPF is a hands-on guide to finding, fixing, and preventing CPU, memory, storage, and networking issues. It unifies classic tooling (perf, ftrace, tcpdump) with modern stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki/Promtail, Elastic) and eBPF for deep visibility in containers and Kubernetes. You'll learn to go from alert ¿ evidence ¿ root cause ¿ prevention with clear thresholds, lab steps, and incident playbooks.

What's InsideCPU & memory deep dives: run queues, steal time, cgroups v2 quotas, PSI, major faults, reclaim, swap, OOM forensics.

Storage & filesystems: queue depth, schedulers, latency histograms (biolatency, iosnoop), ext4/XFS hotspots, I/O wait, async/direct I/O.

Networking: sockets, retransmits, cwnd, RTT, qdisc, NIC rings, RSS, GRO/LRO, DNS/TLS visibility with eBPF, safe packet capture.

Tracing & profiling: perf stat/top/record, ftrace/tracefs, on/off-CPU analysis, Flame Graphs, lock contention, syscall triage.

eBPF in production: verifier safety, tracepoints/kprobes/uprobes, CO-RE, maps, bpftool, bpftrace/BCC one-liners, XDP for defense.

Kubernetes & containers: per-pod visibility, cgroup-aware metrics, CSI volumes, SLO alerts, anti-noise alert design, runbooks.

Operations & tuning: evidence-based kernel and scheduler knobs, capacity & steady-state profiling, security observability (auditd, Falco, eBPF policies), capstone RCA.

For SREs, DevOps, platform and systems engineers, performance engineers, and backend developers who run Linux in production-VMs or bare metal, Docker or Kubernetes. Familiarity with Linux basics is helpful; advanced kernel knowledge is optional.

Designed for fast triage under pressure and deep analysis when time allows. Open to the quick-start playbooks for a 90-second snapshot, then jump deeper with focused labs and checklists. Ideal for incident response, postmortems, and continuous tuning cycles.

Level up your Linux performance engineering today. Use actionable, low-overhead techniques to cut tail latency, stop noisy alerts, and turn signals into fixes-across cloud, containers, and Kubernetes. Add this handbook to your toolbox and ship faster with confidence, backed by metrics, logs, traces, and eBPF.