Post by Hemant N Patil

Ever wonder why tech giants like Datadog and Cilium shifted heavily toward eBPF? Traditional observability tools live in user space. Every time they need system metrics, the kernel has to pause, switch context, and copy data across the boundary. At scale, this heavy context-switching can devour 10%–30% of your CPU just to watch your nodes run. To understand this boundary layer, I built a prototype event collector that interfaces directly with the Linux kernel space using the BCC framework. By using shared memory ring buffers instead of user-space polling, the overhead drops to near zero. Check out my full technical breakdown and a live proof-of-concept where I hook directly into process execution lifecycle events!