News

New Relic Integrates Pixie Observability Platform for Kubernetes

• By John K. Waters
• May 27, 2021

Software analytics company New Relic is integrating its recently acquired open-source Pixie observability platform for Kubernetes with the New Relic One platform, the company announced this week. The company made the announcement during its Future Stack annual developer conference.

Pixie is a Kubernetes-native, in-cluster observability platform the company acquired last year when it bought Pixie Labs. That acquisition was part of an initiative to instrument microservices-based applications without requiring IT organizations to deploy agent software for each one.

The company's CEO and founder, Lew Cirne, described the Pixie's functionality in a blog post at the time: "With a single CLI command, developers are able to see all of their applications’ metrics, events, logs, and traces. Pixie’s technology removes the need to add instrumentation code, set up ad hoc dashboards, or move data off of the cluster, saving developers valuable time so they can focus instead on building better software. Skip the code changes and get instant Kubernetes observability."

New Relic announced plans to open-source Pixie earlier this month as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project under an Apache 2.0 license. New Relic joined the CNCF in 2018 and became a Platinum member earlier this month. The organization serves as the vendor-neutral home for many of popular open-source projects, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy.

New Relic has made commitments to open standards, open instrumentation, and open collaboration. Previously a silver sponsor for AdoptOpenJDK, New Relic is a founding member of its successor group, Eclipse Adoptium, which is becoming the leading provider of high-quality OpenJDK-based binaries.

The company's flagship offering, New Relic One, combines three solutions: a Telemetry Data Platform for collecting, analyzing, and alerting on all types of application and infrastructure data; Full-Stack Observability, which allows users to visualize and troubleshoot the entire software stack across APM, infrastructure, logs, and digital customer experience; and an Applied Intelligence feature for detecting, understanding, and resolving incidents.

Observability refers to the practice of instrumenting systems and applications to collect log data, metrics, and traces to provide actionable insights. It's different from monitoring, which provides instrumentation for the collection and display of app and system data--the what, but not the why. San Francisco-based New Relic's founder is often credited with creating the APM market with the launch of the Insights real-time analytics platform in 2014.

"I believe the opportunity in observability is enormous," New Relic's chief product officer, Bill Staples, told ADTmag.com in an earlier interview. "Given the complexity of distributed systems, it has become an essential ingredient for building software nowadays."