EBPF allows you to access static tracepoints that are defined in many runtime, and can be used to capture information about the state of the runtime.
Since most VM’s/runtimes allow monkey patching you can usually get to the same level of information without using EBPF. We plan to add support for this in Pixie in the future and provide a seamless experience regardless of what underlying tracing technology is used.
Lots of good stuff from Brendan Gregg here: http://www.brendangregg.com/Slides/Velocity2017_BPF_superpow...
To add to what zasgar mentioned, I just wanted to point out that our instrumentation-free approach does apply to JVM and Node/Python applications for many of the traces we gather. For example, we use EBPF to trace protocols like HTTP as the data passes through the kernel. By gathering the data in the kernel, these EBPF tracers are completely language agnostic.
At Pixie, we are building a new type of data system that can deal with the data volume that we collect and process. We have AI/ML models to help classify traffic and make analysis easier. Over the next few weeks, we will release some blog posts that will discuss how this works.
