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Chisels Overview

Xiankun Chen edited this page Mar 29, 2026 · 2 revisions

Chisels are small scripts that extend NoDrop with programmable event analysis.

Instead of building custom monitoring tools from scratch, you can write a Chisel to process system events captured by NoDrop and extract useful information such as statistics, logs, or security insights.

NoDrop Chisels are written in Lua, making them lightweight, easy to write, and fast to execute.

Running a Chisel

A Chisel can be loaded when starting NoDrop:

nodrop start /path/to/script.lua

Once loaded, the Lua script will receive events from NoDrop and execute user-defined logic.

Relationship to Sysdig Chisels

The design of NoDrop Chisels is inspired by the scripting model used in Sysdig.

Similar to Sysdig:

Chisels are written in Lua Scripts process events as they are captured Event fields can be accessed from Lua Users can write custom monitoring logic without modifying NoDrop itself

This approach makes it easy for users familiar with Sysdig to quickly adopt NoDrop.

Learn More

This page only provides a brief overview of Chisels.

To learn how to use and write Chisels, see:

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