eBPF monitoring support for Linux hosts

Something to think about: LM doesn’t (and will likely never) generate metrics. It only gathers metrics. eBPF looks like a way of generating metrics, so really the only thing to think about is how to gather those metrics into LM. The first thing that comes to mind is opentelemetry and the second is fluentd.

Does eBPF support streaming metrics through the opentelemetry protocol? If so, the existing methods for ingesting OTel data could be used, although they are limited through licensing to APM customers because they’re the most common users of OTel. If this kind of metric can be streamed through the OTel protocol, LM might have to think about decoupling the collection method and the data and licensing on the kind of data received (infrastructure management like eBPF, or trace data like APM) instead of the protocol used to collect it.

Does FluentD have a plugin for receiving eBPF telemetry data? If so, you could easily use the LM gem in FluentD to turn that data around and put it into LM Logs. From there, when LogSources are eventually released, their functionality should cover converting that data from logs into datapoints that can be graphed/alerted on.

I cringe whenever someone says LM can’t do something, because usually if LM can’t do it, it’s because it can’t be done.