Mach: Firefighting Time-Critical Issues in Complex Systems Using High-Frequency Telemetry

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Abstract

To understand the complex interactions in modern software, engineers often rely on high-frequency telemetry (HFT) data generated via tools like eBPF. However, today’s database systems are too slow for HFT’s rate and volume and cannot process HFT within the limited resources available on individual host machines. Mach is a new storage engine for collecting and querying HFT. Key to Mach is the Temporal Skip Log (TSL)—a lightweight, write-optimized, log-based data structure specialized for HFT. Mach supports high ingest rates and makes data immediately queryable while operating within a limited on-host resource envelope. Our demo shows how Mach helps engineers collect and query HFT in near real-time when diagnosing performance problems. In contrast, current systems and data reduction techniques fail to keep up. While a widely used time series database (InfluxDB) drops much of the HFT, the audience will see how Mach loses no data and allows them to interactively explore HFT from application and kernel events as they arrive.