Observability Summit North America 2026

Modern observability has embraced eBPF for profiling CPU usage and tracing network paths in production systems. Yet one critical layer remains largely under-instrumented: storage. Despite being a frequent source of performance issues, storage I/O is still treated as a black box, especially in cloud native environments.

This talk we will walk through the basic storage I/O path in Linux and Kubernetes, highlight where traditional metrics fall short, and discuss the kinds of storage latency and wait signals that eBPF can surface at runtime without requiring kernel modifications or specialized debugging setups.

Using simple examples, the session will show how hidden storage latency and queuing effects surface in real workloads, and why these blind spots become more visible with data-intensive and AI workloads where applications or GPUs often wait on storage without clear indicators.

By the end of this talk, attendees will gain a practical understanding of where storage observability breaks down today, what eBPF can realistically help uncover at a foundational level, and how to reason about storage-related performance issues alongside CPU and networking metrics.