Open-source alternatives to Iovisor Bcc

Tetragon is an eBPF-based runtime security and observability toolset designed for Linux and Kubernetes environments. It functions as a security policy manager, observability agent, and enforcement engine that hooks into kernel functions and tracepoints to detect privilege escalation, container escapes, and unauthorized system activity. The project distinguishes itself through its ability to perform real-time, in-kernel enforcement, allowing it to synchronously terminate malicious processes or modify function return values before a system call completes. It provides deep Kubernetes integration

This project is an educational resource providing a comprehensive development tutorial for writing and loading eBPF programs using C, Go, and Rust within the Linux kernel. It serves as a technical guide for developing custom logic to execute directly in the kernel. The materials cover specialized domains including kernel observability and tracing, security implementation for intrusion detection, and high-performance network engineering for packet filtering and load balancing. It also includes dedicated manuals for Linux kernel tracing and the use of kprobes, uprobes, and tracepoints. The pro

Falco is an eBPF runtime security monitor and cloud native detection engine that identifies abnormal behavior and security threats across hosts and containers. It functions as a Linux kernel event auditor, capturing system calls and kernel events in real-time to detect malicious activity. The system distinguishes itself through a rule-based threat detection model that evaluates system activity against a library of community-maintained rules and custom security definitions. It enriches raw kernel events with container and Kubernetes metadata to provide observability into isolated environments

The Linux kernel is a monolithic operating system core that manages hardware resources, memory, and process scheduling across diverse computing architectures. It provides a standardized, POSIX-compliant environment for application execution while maintaining a modular driver framework that allows for the dynamic loading and removal of hardware interfaces. The project is distinguished by its high-performance concurrency toolkit, which utilizes lockless synchronization primitives and read-copy-update mechanisms to manage shared data access in multi-core environments. It incorporates a comprehen

Termshark is a terminal-based network packet analyzer and protocol flow inspector. It serves as a keyboard-driven interface for the tshark command-line utility, providing a terminal user interface to monitor data flow and analyze network traffic. The tool functions as a terminal interface for Wireshark, utilizing its filtering and inspection logic to analyze recorded capture files or live network interfaces. It specifically enables the reassembly and inspection of TCP and UDP flows to isolate traffic patterns and analyze network conversations by protocol. The system includes capabilities for

Stetho is a debug bridge that connects Android applications to Chrome Developer Tools. It allows for the real-time inspection of network traffic, internal application state, and the user interface layout directly within a desktop browser. The project provides specialized inspectors for analyzing Android-specific components. This includes a network inspector for capturing HTTP requests and responses, an SQLite database browser for querying local storage, and a view hierarchy inspector for mapping UI elements and styles. Additional capabilities cover runtime execution via an embedded JavaScrip

This project is a comprehensive educational resource and curriculum focused on site reliability engineering, distributed systems, and infrastructure operations. It provides technical guides, a systems engineering course, and instructional manuals designed to teach the principles of managing large-scale computing environments. The curriculum covers high-level architectural design for scalability and resilience, including fault-tolerant infrastructure, high-availability patterns, and microservices decomposition. It emphasizes the practical application of site reliability engineering through the

This project is a service mesh platform designed to manage, secure, and observe service-to-service communication within Kubernetes clusters. It functions as a control plane that orchestrates transparent sidecar proxies, which intercept and manage network traffic to provide reliable connectivity for microservices. By automating the injection of these proxies, the platform ensures that infrastructure-level policies are applied consistently across all workloads without requiring manual configuration changes. The platform distinguishes itself through its focus on zero-trust security and cross-clu

This is an open-source educational website that translates and localizes MIT's Missing Semester course, teaching practical computing skills for computer science students. The curriculum covers developer tooling, shell scripting, version control, security fundamentals, and open-source collaboration, with a focus on core computing skills including data processing pipelines, workflow automation, secure remote access, shell productivity, Vim editing, and Git version control. The project distinguishes itself by teaching command-line mastery, shell scripting, and automation to boost daily developer

bpftrace is a dynamic instrumentation tool and high-level tracing language for eBPF. It functions as a Linux kernel tracer and user-space profiler used to analyze live software behavior through the on-the-fly insertion of tracing and logging probes. The tool enables the collection of real-time data from the Linux kernel and applications to diagnose issues on live production systems. It intercepts user-level events using uprobes and USDT to debug and profile applications without modifying the original source code. The project covers system observability and performance analysis by monitoring

Sysdig is a Linux system observability tool and kernel event analyzer designed for capturing and analyzing kernel-level system calls and operating system events. It functions as a system call tracer and container security monitor, providing deep visibility into the activity of machines, virtual machines, and containers. The project specializes in non-invasive container inspection, allowing for the monitoring of container activity and resource usage without modifying the container environment or adding instrumentation. It enables the recording of detailed system traces into binary files for re

ProcMon-for-Linux is an eBPF-based system observability tool and process monitor for Linux. It functions as a system call tracer and activity logger, capturing real-time kernel and user-space events to analyze operating system behavior. The project features a text user interface for inspecting recorded trace files. It separates high-performance headless event recording from the analysis interface to prevent data loss during heavy system loads. The tool provides capabilities for system call tracing and activity monitoring, including the ability to filter events by process identifiers or speci

Hotspot is a graphical user interface for analyzing and visualizing performance data captured by the Linux perf tool. It functions as a performance profiling visualizer and assembly-level profiler that maps performance costs to specific instructions synchronized with original source code. The project distinguishes itself through a remote symbol resolver that maps performance data from embedded targets to local host debug symbols and sysroots. It also includes a specialized off-CPU analysis tool designed to identify thread wait times and I/O blocks using kernel scheduler tracepoints. The tool

Inspektor Gadget is an eBPF observability toolset and program framework designed for tracing Linux systems and debugging Kubernetes nodes. It provides a suite of tools to collect kernel-level telemetry and export system metrics via the OpenTelemetry standard. The project distinguishes itself by packaging inspection tools as OCI-compliant container images, allowing for standardized distribution and deployment across clusters and hosts. It employs a modular data processing pipeline that utilizes WebAssembly modules to transform and filter telemetry, and leverages Compile Once Run Everywhere for

This project is a Go library and runtime for loading and managing eBPF programs and maps. It provides a bytecode loader and kernel interface to inject instructions into kernel hooks for system-level execution and observability across both Linux and Windows operating systems. The library features a relocation engine and tooling to ensure program compatibility across different kernel versions and distributions. It supports portable deployment by embedding compiled objects for multiple CPU architectures into a single binary and provides the ability to load signed system drivers on Windows. The

DeepFlow is an eBPF observability platform that provides a suite for continuous profiling, distributed tracing, service dependency mapping, and unified telemetry storage. It functions as a monitoring system that collects metrics, traces, and profiles without requiring manual application instrumentation or modifications to source code. The platform distinguishes itself through the use of protocol-aware packet parsing to reconstruct request chains and automated service dependency mapping to visualize interactions between applications and infrastructure. It utilizes a telemetry data store design

Perfetto is a platform for system-level performance tracing and analysis on Linux and Android. It combines a high-throughput trace recorder, a SQL-based query engine, and a browser-based visualizer into a single toolchain. The platform covers CPU scheduling and call-stack profiling, native and Java heap memory allocation tracking, GPU and graphics events, and system-wide counters such as CPU frequency and power consumption. The architecture decouples trace recording from offline analysis, using a compact protobuf format for event encoding and columnar storage for efficient SQL queries. The we

The Missing Semester is a free, open-source educational curriculum designed to bridge the gap between theoretical computer science and the practical tooling every software engineer needs. Organized as a structured course, it covers Unix shell mastery, version control with Git, software debugging and profiling, system administration fundamentals, and computer security practices — the skills often left out of traditional degree programs. The project is maintained as a collaborative set of lecture notes, exercises, and guides that function as both a professional development tools course and a Uni

Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer and traffic inspector used for capturing and inspecting network traffic. It functions as a packet capture tool that intercepts live data from network interfaces and a TCP/IP dissector that decodes network protocol layers to translate raw binary packets into human-readable fields. The system provides capabilities for protocol stream reconstruction, grouping related packets into cohesive conversations between endpoints. It also operates as a packet file converter, allowing for the reading, modification, and conversion of network capture files across vari

Pyroscope is a continuous profiling platform designed to collect, store, and visualize application performance data. It functions as an application performance management suite that tracks historical resource usage to identify bottlenecks and detect performance regressions over time. The platform distinguishes itself through its use of kernel-level instrumentation and dynamic runtime hooks, which allow for performance monitoring without requiring manual code modifications or application restarts. It employs a sidecar agent architecture to offload telemetry processing, utilizing delta-encoded

This application is a desktop network traffic analyzer that provides real-time monitoring and forensic inspection of data packets. By interfacing directly with low-level system drivers, it captures raw network traffic from physical or virtual adapters to identify communication patterns, track bandwidth usage, and diagnose connectivity issues. The system distinguishes itself through an immediate-mode graphical interface that rebuilds the display state every frame, ensuring high responsiveness during live data updates. It maintains performance by using asynchronous message passing to decouple t

This project is a specialized browser debugging interface designed to monitor DOM elements, network traffic, and JavaScript execution. It provides a client-side user interface for inspecting and debugging web applications, allowing for the real-time modification of CSS styles and the investigation of the JavaScript runtime. The toolkit includes dedicated analysis tools for WebAssembly, featuring disassembly highlighting, scope inspection, and binary execution profiling. It also provides a network traffic inspector for analyzing HTTP requests and a CSS style editor for testing properties and a

Torsniff is a BitTorrent network sniffer and traffic analyzer designed to intercept and capture torrent metadata and peer traffic. It functions as a network utility that extracts information about available files and trackers from peer-to-peer networks. The tool utilizes a distributed hash table to gather metadata without relying on a central tracker. It includes a bencode data parser to decode specialized metadata formats, allowing for the extraction of file names, directory paths, and total sizes. The project covers network monitoring and data analysis through packet-level traffic inspecti

nextest is a high-performance test execution framework and Rust test runner designed to manage parallelism, retries, and timeouts. It serves as a test recording system that captures execution metadata and outputs into archives for later failure analysis and replay. The project distinguishes itself as a flakiness detection tool, identifying unstable tests through stress loops and automated retry policies. It also functions as a CI test orchestrator, capable of partitioning test suites across multiple workers and exporting results in standardized JUnit XML and JSON formats. The framework provi

Arthas is a Java diagnostic tool and runtime debugger designed for real-time troubleshooting of applications. It functions as a remote diagnostics agent that allows users to inspect the runtime state of a Java process, including its heap objects and classloader hierarchies, without requiring a process restart. The project distinguishes itself through advanced bytecode manipulation capabilities, enabling live class hotswapping and the modification of bytecode in running processes. It supports in-memory source compilation and runtime bytecode decompilation to verify and update logic instantly w

VizTracer is a Python runtime instrumentation system and execution profiler used to trace and visualize code execution. It functions as a multi-process performance analyzer and trace visualizer, providing an interactive timeline and flamegraph interface to identify performance bottlenecks and analyze call sequences. The project distinguishes itself by its ability to aggregate execution data from multiple threads, subprocesses, and asynchronous tasks into a single unified report. It also features live process instrumentation, allowing users to attach to and detach from running Python applicati

Scapy is a network packet manipulation tool and protocol analysis suite designed for crafting, sending, sniffing, and dissecting network traffic. It functions as a framework for building custom network tools that interact directly with low-level packet headers and payloads, enabling users to perform security research and network diagnostics. The system distinguishes itself through a layer-based construction model that allows users to define protocols as stacked objects, which automatically handle checksums and field offsets. It utilizes dynamic field reflection to map packet structures to bin