What I Learned From Building an eBPF-Based Traffic Capture Application

Speedscale developed an eBPF-based component that captures plaintext HTTP and HTTPS traffic from Go applications and OpenSSL-based applications without proxies, using probes around TLS and socket read/write functions for analysis and replay. The experience illustrates that narrowly scoped traffic capture is comparatively manageable because it relies on known functions, simple byte buffers, stateless events, and relatively stable interfaces, whereas general-purpose observability grows far more complex. Full application performance monitoring requires runtime-specific handling of differing ABIs, stripped or optimized binaries, JIT compilation, interpreted-language internals, costly user-space probes, stack unwinding, and correlation between kernel threads and higher-level execution models such as Go goroutines or Java virtual threads. Production use also introduces concerns around collecting sensitive plaintext data and working within eBPF verifier and memory constraints. The account concludes that eBPF is highly effective for focused instrumentation, infrastructure monitoring, and security enforcement, but broad multi-language tracing typically demands extensive, specialized engineering rather than a single universal agent.

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