bpftrace vs Mermin
bpftrace
bpftrace.orgMermin
github.comSide by side
| Figure | bpftrace | Mermin |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · eBPF Observability Tools | 8.6 (#4) | 7.1 (#22) |
| Purpose | bpftrace is a high-level tracing language for Linux for writing observability-based eBPF programs. | Mermin captures network traffic with eBPF and exports network flows as OpenTelemetry Flow Traces. |
| Support | The project README lists GitHub Discussions, the issue tracker, monthly office hours, and Discord as ways to get help or participate. | The project directs users to GitHub Issues, GitHub Discussions, Slack, and documentation, and points to ElastiFlow for commercial support. |
Plans
In their own words
bpftrace
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.