bpftrace vs DeepFlow

bpftrace is a free, high-level tracing language and general-purpose Linux tracing tool built on eBPF. It supports kernel and user-space dynamic tracing, perf events, USDT, uprobes, and tracepoints. Its language draws from awk, C, DTrace, and SystemTap. Programs can come from files, inline -e input, or standard input, and the standard library supplies builtins, functions, macros, and map-value functions. LLVM compiles scripts to eBPF bytecode; libbpf interacts with Linux’s BPF subsystem, with bcc also used in the implementation. Scripts can import bpftrace files, C headers, BPF C source, and supported directory files. Unsafe helpers require --unsafe, and imports from world-writable directories are refused. The default probe maximum is 1,024; increasing it can raise memory use, startup time, overhead, or risk freezes and crashes. Supported architectures include x86_64, arm64, s390x, arm32, loongarch64, mips64, ppc64, and riscv64. Some features need kernel headers; vmlinux BTF needs Linux 4.18 or later with CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF enabled.

DeepFlow is an observability product for cloud infrastructure and cloud-native applications. It uses eBPF to collect application performance metrics, distributed traces, and continuous profiling data without intrusion. Its core capabilities include a universal service map, distributed tracing, and profiling. Built-in parsing covers HTTP, HTTPS, Dubbo, gRPC, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka, MQTT, and DNS. DeepFlow can serve as storage for Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, SkyWalking, and Pyroscope, and offers SQL, PromQL, and OTLP interfaces. AutoTagging links observability data with cloud and Kubernetes resources, tags, and CMDB business tags. The Community Edition is open source under Apache 2.0 and is listed at free. It supports Linux servers and selected Kubernetes, cloud, and container environments; deployment guidance covers Kubernetes and Docker Compose. Enterprise Edition adds encrypted agent-to-server transmission, multi-tenancy, and data permission isolation. The listed platforms include Android, API, Linux, self-hosted, web, and Windows.