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

blog.pixielabs.ai

31–40 of 66 posts

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

#31

Don’t see the source code in GitHub. When do you plan to open it up? Interested in digging into your engine code.

Co-founder/CEO of Pixie here.

We are preparing to open source early next year, so stay tuned. The code will be posted on our repository, that currently hosts our community scripts: https://github.com/pixie-labs/pixie.

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

#33
This adds to some interestsing acquisition activity in this area: Splunk, for example, just acquired Flowmill (also focusing on eBPF + observability).

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/24/splunk-acquires-network-ob...

[blatantly promoting my substack] Been following this area about a year, first wrote about some of startups using eBPF here in late 2019: https://monitoring2.substack.com/p/ebpf-a-new-bff-for-observ...

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

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eBPF is great but it only works for linux and access to the kernel layer doesn't work for serverless environments, so it's definitely a piece of the puzzle but not a silver bullet IMO.

Is there any technical reason why it couldn't work with serverless?

Because serverless still needs to run on a machine, and that machine is typically at least one of 1. shared with other users, in which case giving you kernel access would be a security issue, or 2. ephemeral (firecracker VM or such) in which case eBPF is... technically possible, but not nearly as useful (you go from "this server has had X events of type Y over the last 24 hours" to "this VM had X events happen in the 590ms before it was destroyed").

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

#36

I know what eBPF is, but what is Pixie? A single sentence describing Pixie wouid be useful. In general, academic rule applies: Never write an article without defining terms beforehand.

Engineer from Pixie here. Pixie is an APM tool for Kubernetes leveraging eBPF for automatic data collection. You can use it to monitor and debug your application performance, without code or configuration changes.

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

#37
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

hadn't thought of this like DTrace. Thx for that!

Anytime! eBPF is Linux’s equivalent of DTrace

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

#38

I know what eBPF is, but what is Pixie? A single sentence describing Pixie wouid be useful. In general, academic rule applies: Never write an article without defining terms beforehand.

Engineer from Pixie here. Pixie is an APM tool for Kubernetes leveraging eBPF for automatic data collection. You can use it to monitor and debug your application performance, without code or configuration changes.

APM? /s

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

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineer from Pixie here. Pixie is an APM tool for Kubernetes leveraging eBPF for automatic data collection. You can use it to monitor and debug your application performance, without code or configuration changes.

APM? /s

/s noted (but point also taken). For those unfamiliar: APM = application performance monitoring. Essentially, figuring out why your application is slow or broken.

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineer from Pixie here. Pixie is an APM tool for Kubernetes leveraging eBPF for automatic data collection. You can use it to monitor and debug your application performance, without code or configuration changes.

APM? /s

Application Performance Monitoring

https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/apm/new-relic-apm/getting-sta...

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