Pixie is Now Available as Part of New Relic One

Today we’re announcing that Pixie is now generally available as part of New Relic One. Pixie is a significant upgrade to our Kubernetes toolset. It is the only solution that removes the monitoring gaps that naturally emerge in Kubernetes environments and provides code-level insights so developers can debug faster.

About Pixie

For those unfamiliar with Pixie, it’s a next-generation open source observability tool that is rapidly gaining traction among developers. It provides unparalleled visibility into your Kubernetes applications.

Pixie automatically captures:

• Application profiles (with function-level granularity),
• Full-body requests (HTTPs, Redis, SQL, and others),
• System metrics like CPU, I/O, and memory usage,
• The Kubernetes-specific state of your pods and services, and
• More data.

Pixie’s bleeding edge auto-instrumentation technology means that you can get started in minutes, not months. No code changes or redeployments required.

The Pixie team joined New Relic back in December 2020, and since then, we’ve been working hard to bring all the benefits of auto-telemetry and advanced Kubernetes monitoring into the New Relic experience. With today’s GA of this integration, we are embedding all of Pixie’s functionality directly inside the New Relic One UI. 

Tackling the Kubernetes monitoring problem

We’re on a mission to solve a few gnarly problems that every engineer has to deal with in a Kubernetes environment. The ever-changing, dynamic nature of Kubernetes environments results in blind spots, and alternative Kubernetes monitoring solutions simply aren’t optimized for developers. Pixie solves for both. When you upgrade your Kubernetes debugging with Pixie, you get the following capabilities: 

Instant, no-code baseline visibility

We’ve all been there—there’s an issue in production, but the existing instrumentation on prod isn’t sufficient to debug the problem. This limited visibility makes life difficult for developers who want to spend less time troubleshooting issues and more time developing new features.

There’s an easier way. Pixie uses eBPF to automatically instrument your Kubernetes applications as soon as they start running. With Pixie, you never need to redeploy or manually instrument your code in order to get the most up-to-date telemetry data for your services. And because Pixie is language agnostic, there’s no instrumentation expertise needed. 

Code-level insights to debug faster

It’s no secret that most Kubernetes monitoring solutions, including amazing tools like Prometheus, are designed primarily for operations teams, which made sense in the early days. These tools focus on the status of clusters and their components but lack actionable information for developers. Pixie is purpose-built for developers, helping you identify performance bottlenecks faster with code-level insights. 

Our integration with Pixie automatically provides: 

• Flamegraphs for all of the pods in your cluster 
• Function-level granularity for application performance
• Full-body requests, latencies, and errors—all without sampling

Application topology views to correlate performance

With Pixie data powering New Relic One UI experiences, you can quickly understand how nodes, pods, containers, and applications affect each other. Our integration with Pixie provides a bird’s-eye view of your cluster so you can have immediate context into what’s happening.

You can seamlessly drill down into both application-level and infrastructure-level behavior so you can correlate the impact application changes are having on your infrastructure and vice versa.

Video: Debug faster with code-level insights