When to Hire a Computer Performance Engineering Team (2025) part 1 of 2

Brendan Gregg · 3 Aug 2025 · brendangregg.com ↗

3 korrents from this piece

Brendan Gregg did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
A new performance engineering team can typically halve a company's infrastructure spend within its first couple of years.

Their wordsA new performance team can likely find enough optimizations to halve infrastructure spend in their first couple of years, even for companies that have been using commercial performance or observability tools.
Our reading
Monitoring tools that do periodic work can themselves cause the latency outliers they were installed to diagnose.

Their wordsOne performance anti-pattern is when a company, to debug one performance problem, installs a monitoring tool that periodically does work and causes application latency outliers.
Our reading
A performance test without an explanation of its limiting factor should be treated as unanalyzed and possibly bogus.

Their wordsAny performance test should be accompanied by an explanation of the limiting factor, since no explanation will reveal the test wasn't analyzed and the result may be bogus.