Andrea Casarin

Andrea Casarin

Published on: 5/3/2022, 4:23:00 PM - Reading time: 0 minute

eBPF application monitoring on Kubernetes

Just a quick one, since I recently found out about Pixie which is a super interesting opensource project recently bought by NewRelic.

It's an agent which you can install on your k8s cluster (or on your standard VM). It uses eBPF to collect deep data from Linux Kernel, granting the ability to monitor an application without the need of an APM (Application Performance Management). It promises a maximum 5% overhead.

The frontend uses PxL Script (which is similar to python + panda) to fetch data from backend, which is queried directly.

You can use it standalone, on premise, or for example with NewRelic (since the data stays on your host there is no cost for data ingestion).

That's a great video from Pixie explaining the technology in details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shJ45UJvFR4.