How to trace code directly with eBPF

Mihalis Tsoukalos explains how to take advantage of eBFP with a range of different programming languages.

- Mihalis Tsoukalos

OUR EXPERT Mihalis Tsoukalos is the author of Go Systems Programming and Mastering Go, and is currently working with Time Series.

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Tools such as nm, objdump and readelf can help you check the symbol table is present in a binary executable whether If there is no symbol table, most of the time the best solution is to recompile the software with the appropriate command-line options.

Tracing programming languages is a relatively difficult task, but we're not going to let that stop us, and are going to learn the principles of tracing C, Java and Bash shell scripts. First, though, let's talk a little more about eBPF internals and how to expose eBPF metrics to Prometheus.

You are not going to need this information on a daily basis, especially if you are not developing eBPF tools from scratch, but it might come handy when you want to know what is happening behind the scenes when executing eBPF code.