Alpha Beast
Charly’s Column – Sysdig

In this issue, sys admin columnist and tool veterinarian Charly Kühnast invites Sysdig, the jack-of-all-trades among system diagnostic tools, into his surgery for a quick checkup. The project promises to unite the functionality of lsof, iftop, netstat, tcpdump, and others.
Where an alpha beast claims to replace an entire herd, the bar is naturally fairly high. Of course, the Wireshark authors, who are also the people behind the Sysdig [1] project, are no beginners. The software only performs well if you have root privileges; otherwise, it can't access all the required system areas. If you launch the tool without parameters, a steady stream of system messages scrolls by: It meticulously logs every single syscall. To thin out the thicket, Sysdig uses what it calls chisels. You can find out which chisels exist with the sysdig -cl
command.
The chisels are sorted into categories (Net, IO, application, logs, and so on). For example, the Performance category has a chisel named netlower
. I decided to pass in a time value of 10 milliseconds as a parameter:
sysdig -c netlower 10
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
Danish Ministry of Digital Affairs Transitions to Linux
Another major organization has decided to kick Microsoft Windows and Office to the curb in favor of Linux.
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.