How Google Leverages eBPF for Real-Time Lock Contention Analysis and Low-Overhead Fleet Diagnostics

Download this case study in PDF version Overview At Google’s global operational scale, detecting and troubleshooting localized performance anomalies, such as sporadic I/O latency spikes, presents major infrastructural challenges. Traditional diagnostic tools introduce overhead in active clusters, while alternative methods like deploying custom debug kernels require weeks and frequently fail to capture transient anomalies. To resolve these limitations, Google deployed lightweight, dynamic eBPF tracing programs across its fleet to analyze real-time lock contention and conduct ad-hoc diagnostics