Brendan Gregg
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.
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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
- Brendan Gregg. "DTraceToolkit".
- Bryan Cantrill; Brendan Gregg (2008-12-31). "Shouting in the Datacenter".
- USENIX Association (2013-11-10). "LISA Outstanding Achievement Award".
- Brendan Gregg. "www.brendangregg.com/blog".
- Gregg, Brendan. "The USE Method". www.brendangregg.com. Retrieved 2018-07-06.
- Joab Jackson (2010-06-28). "Oracle engineer reveals latency mysteries with heat maps". Archived from the original on 2013-11-09. Retrieved 2013-11-09.
- Joab Jackson (2013-11-08). "Flame graph shows computer system performance in a new light".
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.