New Relic Integrates Pixie for Kubernetes Observability
During the online FutureStack 2021 conference today, New Relic announced it is integrating its open source Pixie observability platform for Kubernetes with the New Relic One platform.
The company gained Pixie with the acquisition of Pixie Labs late last year, as part of an initiative to instrument microservices-based applications without requiring IT organizations to deploy agent software for each one. Instead, microservices telemetry data is collected via Kubernetes. Subsequently, New Relic pledged to donate Pixie to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Ishan Mukherjee, head of product go-to-market for New Relic, says the Kubernetes Experience, powered by Pixie Auto-Telemetry, in New Relic One makes it possible for organizations that have adopted New Relic One to observe monolithic application environments to now also analyze traces, logs and metrics collected from microservices-based applications.
Currently in beta, that approach enables IT teams to analyze all the data collected versus relying on sampling techniques. Once that data is collected, New Relic One applies machine learning algorithms and other artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to identify the relevant data that should transferred to the New Relic Telemetry Data Platform for correlation and long term storage.
New Relic also announced it is adding error tracking, custom dashboard visualizations and programmability features to New Relic One to improve observability capabilities. The company is also partnering with Kentik to add network monitoring capabilities to the New Relic One platform, which Mukherjee notes will make it simpler for DevOps teams to monitor network operations within the context of a larger observability platform.
Finally, New Relic is making available two community editions of its offerings for students and teachers and another for startups that want to employ New Relic One on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.
New Relic is making a case for an observability platform that can be extended to add support for microservices-based applications as an alternative to requiring IT teams to deploy two separate platforms. The company fully expects that other providers of observability platforms will add support for Pixie to provide the same type of capabilities in a similar fashion, notes Mukherjee.
In general, Mukherjee says, the impetus for deploying observability platforms as an alternative to traditional monitoring tools is coming from organizations that have hired site reliability engineers (SRE) as well as IT leaders that are moving to create observability centers of excellence. The goal is to eventually replace legacy monitoring tools – that don’t provide the same level of context as an observability platform – across a range of applications and classes of IT infrastructure, notes Mukherjee.
Most IT teams today waste large amounts of time simply trying to correlate data collected from disparate monitoring tools to identify the root cause of an issue that, once discovered, might only take a few minutes to fix. It’s not clear at what rate IT organizations are embracing observability platforms, but it’s already apparent there is no shortage of options.
Regardless of which platform is employed, the way IT is managed is fundamentally changing in a way that might result in faster resolution of issues at a lower cost, as existing IT monitoring tools are rationalized.
