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New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform

blog.pixielabs.ai

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Re: New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform

#11

Post by SEJeff »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #5
thejonanshow wrote: post #3

I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on eBPF generally, it seems likely that this is where observability companies are headed. It's non-trivial to implement but monitoring from the kernel layer makes so much sense that I expect the tooling will come along quickly.

What's the advantage of monitoring from the kernel layer? It's not jumping out at me...

Tracing from user to kernel back to userspace in one single pane of glass. Have you never heard anyone hype about DTrace on Solaris? This allows building similar things on production systems with little to no impact on running production applications.

Re: New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform

#15

Post by pkaye »

imukherjee wrote: post #9
ssssttt wrote: post #8

seems ambitious. why would a public company like new relic do this?

Co-Founder/CPO of Pixie here. This definitely is an unprecedented and forward looking investment by New Relic. While ambitious, it became evident in our conversations with them they we committed on standardizing on open source telemetry standards such as Prometheus, Open-Telemetry, Graphana etc. We're not yet in a position to speak for them in detail but we believe this bet on our project reinforces their plan to ope…

How does Pixie technology compare to Sysdig? Do they do similar things?

Re: New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform

#16

Post by seneca »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #5
thejonanshow wrote: post #3

I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on eBPF generally, it seems likely that this is where observability companies are headed. It's non-trivial to implement but monitoring from the kernel layer makes so much sense that I expect the tooling will come along quickly.

What's the advantage of monitoring from the kernel layer? It's not jumping out at me...

The kernel has a "god's eye view" of everything happening on its OS. With event based tracing in the kernel there's no chance of missing an occurrence because your sampling rate is too low, for example. You can also correlate and enrich data that just isn't available in userspace.

Re: New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform

#17

Post by seneca »

morelisp wrote: post #7
thejonanshow wrote: post #3

I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on eBPF generally, it seems likely that this is where observability companies are headed. It's non-trivial to implement but monitoring from the kernel layer makes so much sense that I expect the tooling will come along quickly.

For hardware management maybe but so much of "observability" in general is at the application layer I can't see BPF displacing anything more than a tiny corner of it. On the other hand - it already is overhauling service meshes, VPNs and firewalls and network security policies, etc. The stuff fly.io is debuting now is probably going to be standard in few years.

Strongly disagree. BPF uprobes allow extremely fine grained tracing of userspace applications, and allow you to programmatically correlate them with kernel level information.

Re: New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform

#18

Post by zasgar »

bogomipz wrote: post #14

I was not familiar with this project. In looking at the architecture[1] documentation it indicates it uses the Pixie Cloud. Is is possible to use this without the Pixie cloud? [1] https://docs.pixielabs.ai/about-pixie/how-pixie-works/

Co-founder/CEO of Pixie here.

In the current form Pixie Cloud is required since it's a freemium product.

We are planning to open-source a self-managed version of Pixie early next year, and it can be used completely self-hosted.

Re: New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform

#19

Post by bogomipz »

zasgar wrote: post #18
bogomipz wrote: post #14

I was not familiar with this project. In looking at the architecture[1] documentation it indicates it uses the Pixie Cloud. Is is possible to use this without the Pixie cloud? [1] https://docs.pixielabs.ai/about-pixie/how-pixie-works/

Co-founder/CEO of Pixie here. In the current form Pixie Cloud is required since it's a freemium product. We are planning to open-source a self-managed version of Pixie early next year, and it can be used completely self-hosted.

Thanks, I will be looking forward to this announcement as the current requirement would prevent me from using it. Cheers.

Re: New Relic to open-source Pixie’s eBPF observability platform

#20

Post by neelaj »

My take is that eBPF is such a powerful technology that it holds the potential to fundamentally change how Networking, Observability and Security are delivered. Just like Virtualization and now Containers/Kubernetes challenged an entire industry focused on big servers, the ability to safely embed programs into the Linux Kernel w/ eBPF challenges every incumbent. We're seeing every incumbent vendor look hard at the technology and make build vs. buy calculations. New Relic probably compared acquiring Pixie this early to either building internally or waiting to see how things developed for both the market and Pixie. I'm guessing they made a bet that the longer they waited the more expensive it would be to buy an eBPF based company. It was a good fit so they pulled the trigger, de-risking things for both themselves and the Pixie team (Note I have no inside info this is all just a guess).
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