Brendan Gregg

Brendan Gregg speaking at ZFS Day, Oct 2, 2012, San Francisco.

Brendan Gregg is a kernel and performance engineer at Netflix, known for his work in systems performance analysis. He previously worked at Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation, and Joyent.

Gregg was born in Newcastle, New South Wales and attended University of Newcastle, Australia. After working as a technical instructor for Sun Microsystems and later as a consultant, he was hired to join Sun's Fishworks team in San Francisco. In October, 2010, he left Oracle for a position as a Lead Performance Engineer at Joyent. In March, 2014, he became a Senior Performance Architect at Netflix.

Gregg is one of the leading experts on DTrace, creator of the DTraceToolkit,^[1] and author of books on DTrace and systems performance. He is also the star of the Shouting in the Data Center viral video.^[2]

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."^[3]

He now investigates and writes about Linux performance on his new blog.^[4]

Contributions[]

Gregg has developed various methodologies for performance analysis, notably the USE Method methodology (short for Utilization Saturation and Errors Method).^[5]

He has also created visualization types to aid performance analysis, including latency heat maps,^[6] utilization heat maps, subsecond offset heat maps, and flame graphs.^[7]

Publications[]

• Brendan Gregg (December 2019). BPF Performance Tools. ISBN 978-0136554820.
• Brendan Gregg (April 2014). "The Case of the Clumsy Kernel". ;login:. USENIX. 39 (2): 21–25. ISSN 1044-6397. Retrieved 2014-09-16.
• Brendan Gregg (October 2013). Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud. ISBN 0133390098.

• Brendan Gregg (February 2013). "Thinking Methodically About Performance". Communications of the ACM. (detail link). 56 (2): 45–51. doi:10.1145/2408776.2408791. Retrieved 2013-03-17.
• Brendan Gregg; Jim Mauro (2011). DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. ISBN 0-13-209151-8.
• Brendan Gregg (July 2010). "Visualizing System Latency". Communications of the ACM. 53 (7): 48–54. doi:10.1145/1785414.1785435. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
• Richard McDougall; Jim Mauro; Brendan Gregg (2006). Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris. ISBN 0131568191.

Talks[]

• Brendan Gregg (2014-10-02). "Brendan Gregg - Performance Analysis". MeetBSD 2014. Retrieved 2014-10-17.
• Brendan Gregg (2014-08-20). "Linux Performance Tools". LinuxCon. Retrieved 2014-09-16.
• Brendan Gregg (2014-02-22). "What Linux can learn from Solaris performance, and vice versa". SCaLE. Retrieved 2014-09-16.
• Brendan Gregg (2013-11-07). "Blazing Performance with Flame Graphs". USENIX LISA. Retrieved 2013-11-12.
• Brendan Gregg (2013-07-26). "Open Source Systems Performance". OSCON. Retrieved 2013-10-24.
• Brendan Gregg (2013-06-19). "Stop the Guessing: Performance Methodologies for Production Systems". Velocity. Retrieved 2013-10-24.
• Brendan Gregg (2013-02-24). "Linux Performance Analysis and Tools". Southern California Area Linux Expo (SCaLE) 11x. Retrieved 2013-03-17.
• Brendan Gregg (2012-12-13). "Performance Analysis Methodology". USENIX LISA 2012. Retrieved 2013-03-17.
• Brendan Gregg (2012-10-02). "ZFS: Performance Analysis and Tools". zfsday 2012. Retrieved 2013-03-17.
• Brendan Gregg (2012-07-25). "The USE Method". FISL 13. Retrieved 2013-03-17.
• Bryan Cantrill & Brendan Gregg (2012-09-28). "The Real-Time Web in the Real World: DIRT in Production". Surge '12. Archived from the original on 2014-04-05. Retrieved 2013-03-17.
• Dave Pacheco; Brendan Gregg (2011-07-26). "Design and Implementation of a Real-Time Cloud Analytics Platform". Open Source Convention Data (OSCON data) 2011. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
• Brendan Gregg (2011-05-26). "Breaking Down Query Latency With DTrace". Percona Live NYC 2011. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
• Brendan Gregg (2010-11-11). "Visualizations for Performance Analysis". USENIX LISA 2010. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
• Brendan Gregg; Jim Mauro (2010-10-24). "How To Build Better Applications With Oracle Solaris DTrace". Oracle Open World 2010. Archived from the original on 2012-09-30. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
• Brendan Gregg (July 2009). "DTrace Crash Course". Kernel Conference Australia (KCA). Archived from the original on 2012-09-30. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
• Brendan Gregg (July 2009). "Kernel Engineering". Kernel Conference Australia (KCA). Archived from the original on 2012-09-30. Retrieved 2011-08-26.
• Bryan Cantrill; Brendan Gregg (2008-11-14). "Analytics in the Sun 7000 Series" (PDF). Customer Engineering Conference (CEC) 2008. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-09-30. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
• Brendan Gregg; Cindi McGuire (2008-11-09). "Fishworks" (PDF). Customer Engineering Conference (CEC) 2008. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-09-30. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
• Adam Leventhal; Brendan Gregg (2007-07-26). "Why Observability Matters - How DTrace Helped Twitter". Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2007. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
• Brendan Gregg (5 October 2006). "DTrace TCP Provider". Oracle. Archived from the original on 30 September 2012. Retrieved 2012-01-31.

References[]

External links[]

• "Interview with Brendan Gregg, winner of the 2013 LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration". 2013-11-12.
• "Brendan's new blog".
• "Brendan's previous blog".
• Brendan Gregg (2010-11-11). "Visualizations for Performance Analysis (and More)". USENIX LISA 2010.
• Brendan Gregg (2009-10-29). "Little Shop of Performance Horrors". FROSUG (Front Range OpenSolaris User Group). Archived from the original on 2012-09-30. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
• Brendan Gregg; Jim Mauro; Roch Bourbonnais (2010-04-29). "Performance Instrumentation Counters". Archived from the original on 2012-09-30. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
• Brendan Gregg; Roch Bourbonnais (2010-06-07). "Performance: Experimentation". Archived from the original on 2012-09-30. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
• Jim Mauro; Brendan Gregg; Roch Bourbonnais (2010-06-07). "Performance: The "Not a Problem" Problem". Archived from the original on 2012-09-30. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
• Brendan Gregg (2011-05-20). "Dynamic Tracing and the DTrace book" (PDF). BayLISA 2011.

Patents[]

US patent 8547379, David Pacheco, Brendan Gregg, Bryan Cantrill, "Systems, methods, and media for generating multidimensional heat maps", issued 2013-10-01, assigned to Joyent Inc. 

US patent 8468251, William D. Pijewski, Gerald A. Jelinek, Brendan Gregg, Bryan Cantrill, "Dynamic throttling of access to computing resources in multi-tenant systems", issued 2013-06-18, assigned to Joyent Inc. 

US patent 8032708, Brendan D. Gregg, Adam H. Leventhal, Bryan M. Cantrill, "Method and system for caching data in a storage system", issued 2011-10-04, assigned to Oracle America, Inc. 

US patent 7979638, Adam H. Leventhal, Brendan D. Gregg, Bryan M. Cantrill, "Method and system for accessing data using an asymmetric cache device", issued 2011-07-12, assigned to Oracle America, Inc.