---
title: "Tracer Agent"
description: "Learn about the Tracer Agent architecture and capabilities"
---
Why Tracer’s Architecture Is Unique

The Tracer Agent is the heart of Tracer’s platform, a lightweight process that runs on your compute nodes and observes pipeline execution from the kernel upward.

Most monitoring systems rely on application-level hooks or SDKs that require code changes and introduce overhead.
In scientific workloads, where thousands of short-lived processes execute complex binaries (BLAST, BWA, GATK, TensorFlow, etc.), this approach simply doesn’t scale.

Tracer solves this by leveraging eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter) technology to monitor workloads directly from the Linux kernel, safely and with minimal overhead.