bpftrace VS bcc

Compare bpftrace vs bcc and see what are their differences.

bpftrace

High-level tracing language for Linux eBPF [Moved to: https://github.com/bpftrace/bpftrace] (by iovisor)

bcc

BCC - Tools for BPF-based Linux IO analysis, networking, monitoring, and more (by iovisor)
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bpftrace bcc
24 79
7,647 20,904
- 0.6%
0.0 9.0
about 1 year ago 8 days ago
C++ C
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

bpftrace

Posts with mentions or reviews of bpftrace. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-08.

bcc

Posts with mentions or reviews of bcc. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-02-03.
  • Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Feb 2025
    It is quite simple to use eBPF with uprobes to hook library calls, for example: https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/blob/master/tools/sslsniff.py

    The downside is this doesn't work with anything not using OpenSSL, there are projects like https://github.com/gojue/ecapture which have interceptors for many common libraries, but the downside is that needs different code for each library.

    I think providing a TLS certificate is fine for the use cases of the tool; most tools won't be doing certificate pinning, but ecapture does support Android where this is more likely.

  • Snooping on your GPU: Using eBPF to Build Zero-instrumentation CUDA Monitoring
    3 projects | dev.to | 22 Dec 2024
    Enter BCC-memleak. This is an eBPF-based tool that allows the user to find leaking memory by attaching it to a running process. All it took was compiling the leaking library with a debug flag, attaching memleak to my process, and voila. Within 30 minutes I had found the exact function call that was leaking memory, identified how much memory was leaking per call, and opened a PR for a one-line patch.
  • Intentrace: Strace for Everyone
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Nov 2024
  • Measuring Function Latency with eBPF
    4 projects | dev.to | 30 Sep 2024
    If you are looking for a production-ready tool for function latency measurement, you might want to check out the full implementation available in the BCC repository.
  • Capturing SSL/TLS plaintext without a CA certificate using eBPF
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jul 2024
  • Show HN: Xcapture-bpf – like Linux top, but with x-ray vision
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jul 2024
    Yeah, I already see limitations, the last one was yesterday when I installed earlier Ubuntu versions to see how far back this can go - and even Ubuntu 22.04 didn't work out of the box, ended up with some BCC/kernel header mismatch issue [1] although the kernel itself supported it. A workaround was to download & compile the latest BCC yourself, but I don't want to go there as the customers/systems I work on wouldn't go there anyway.

    But libbpf with CO-RE will solve these issues as I understand, so as long as the kernel supports what you need, the CO-RE binary will work.

    This raises another issue for me though, it's not easy, but easier, for enterprises to download and run a single python + single C source file (with <500 code lines to review) than a compiled CO-RE binary, but my long term plan/hope is that I (we) get the RedHats and AWSes of this world to just provide the eventual mature release as a standard package.

    [1] https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/issues/3993

  • Decoding Network Traffic: The Vital Role of Telemetry in Understanding Network Activity
    1 project | dev.to | 30 May 2024
    git clone https://github.com/iovisor/bcc.git mkdir bcc/build; cd bcc/build cmake .. make sudo make install cmake -DPYTHON_CMD=python3 .. # build python3 binding pushd src/python/ make sudo make install popd
  • eBPF: Unleashing Kernel Magic for Modern Infrastructure
    1 project | dev.to | 21 Apr 2024
    But wait, there's more! Enter the BCC toolkit and library, your trusty sidekick in simplifying the arcane art of writing eBPF applications. With BCC by your side, you'll be wielding eBPF like a seasoned pro in no time.
  • Linux: Easy Keylogger with eBPF (2018)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2024
    Nice - I normally use [bash-readline](https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/blob/master/tools/bashreadlin...) when coworking/co-inhabiting a server or training someone.
  • eBPF Documentary
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Mar 2024
    One of the big wins is not so much “build and run your own stuff” but there are very nice low-cost (in terms of compute) performance utilities built on eBPF

    https://github.com/iovisor/bcc

    There are so many utilities in that list; there’s a diagram midway down the readme which tries to help show their uses. bcc-tools should be available in any distro.

    Also, Brendan Gregg does a ton of performance stuff that is worth knowing about if you check out his other work. Not eBPF only. Flame graphs are useful.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing bpftrace and bcc you can also consider the following projects:

ebpf_exporter - Prometheus exporter for custom eBPF metrics

libbpf - Automated upstream mirror for libbpf stand-alone build.

gyeeta - Gyeeta - An Open Source eBPF based Observability Product for your Infrastructure, Services and Processes. This repository is for the Agent and Server C++ code.

flamegraph - Easy flamegraphs for Rust projects and everything else, without Perl or pipes <3

el7-bpf-specs - RPM specs for building bpf related tools on CentOS 7

ebpf-for-windows - eBPF implementation that runs on top of Windows

OpenCSD - OpenCSD: eBPF Computational Storage Device (CSD) for Zoned Namespace (ZNS) SSDs in QEMU

libbpf-bootstrap - Scaffolding for BPF application development with libbpf and BPF CO-RE

awesome-ebpf - A curated list of awesome projects related to eBPF.

zfs - OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD

kubectl-trace - Schedule bpftrace programs on your kubernetes cluster using the kubectl

lexbor - Lexbor is development of an open source HTML Renderer library. https://lexbor.com

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