Brendan Gregg is an internationally renowned expert in computing performance. He works for

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

, and previously worked at

Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fil ...

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

, and

Joyent Joyent Inc. was a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Specializing in cloud computing, it marketed infrastructure-as-a-service. On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics. Services Triton, Joye ...

. He was born in

Newcastle, New South Wales Newcastle ( ; Awabakal: ) is a metropolitan area and the second most populated city in the state of New South Wales, Australia. It includes the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie local government areas, and is the hub of the Greater Newcastle area, w ...

and graduated from the

University of Newcastle, Australia The University of Newcastle (UON), informally known as Newcastle University, is a public university in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. Established in 1965, it has a primary campus in the Newcastle suburb of Callaghan. The university als ...

. 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." He investigates and writes about Linux performance on his blog.

Contributions

Gregg has developed various methodologies for performance analysis, notably the USE Method methodology (short for ''Utilization Saturation and Errors Method''). He has also created visualization types to aid performance analysis, including latency heat maps, utilization heat maps, subsecond offset heat maps, and flame graphs. His tools are included in multiple operating systems and products, and are in use by companies worldwide. He pioneered

eBPF eBPF (often aliased BPF) is a technology that can run sandboxed programs in a privileged context such as the operating system kernel. It is used to safely and efficiently extend the capabilities of the kernel at runtime without requiring to chan ...

as an observability technology, 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 the leading expert on using

DTrace DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under ...

and the creator of the ''DTraceToolkit'',. He is also the star of the ''Shouting in the Data Center'' viral video.

Publications

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References

External links

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Patents

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gregg, Brendan Living people Australian computer scientists Computer programmers Solaris people Year of birth missing (living people)