Brendan Gregg

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. 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."

Contributions

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

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

He pioneered eBPF as an observability technology, 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.

Publications

Patents