Broken benchmarks, misleading metrics, and terrible tools. This talk will help you navigate the treacherous waters of system performance tools, touring common problems with system metrics, monitoring, statistics, visualizations, measurement overhead, and benchmarks. This will likely involve some unlearning, as you discover tools you have been using for years, are in fact, misleading, dangerous, or broken.

The speaker, Brendan Gregg, has given many popular talks on operating system performance tools. This is an anti-version of these talks, to focus on broken tools and metrics instead of the working ones. Metrics can be misleading, and counters can be counter-intuitive! This talk will include advice and methodologies for verifying new performance tools, understanding how they work, and using them successfully.