May 1, 2021

569 words 3 mins read

pixie-labs/pixie

pixie-labs/pixie

Instant Kubernetes-Native Application Observability

repo name pixie-labs/pixie
repo link https://github.com/pixie-labs/pixie
homepage https://px.dev/
language C++
size (curr.) 38408 kB
stars (curr.) 1348
created 2020-02-27
license Apache License 2.0

Pixie!

Docs Slack Mentioned in Awesome Kubernetes Mentioned in Awesome Go Build Status codecov

What is Pixie?

Pixie gives you instant visibility by giving access to metrics, events, traces and logs without changing code.

Try our community beta and join our community on slack.

Quick Start

Review Pixie’s requirements to make sure that your Kubernetes cluster is supported.

Signup

Visit our product page and signup with your google account.

Install CLI

Run the command below:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://withpixie.ai/install.sh)"

Or see our Installation Docs to install Pixie using Docker, Debian, RPM or with the latest binary.

(optional) Setup a sandbox

If you don’t already have a K8s cluster available, you can use Minikube to set-up a local environment:

  • On Linux, run minikube start --cpus=4 --memory=6000 --driver=kvm2 -p=<cluster-name>. The default docker driver is not currently supported, so using the kvm2 driver is important.

  • On Mac, run minikube start --cpus=4 --memory=6000 -p=<cluster-name>.

More detailed instructions are available here.

Start a demo-app:

🚀 Deploy Pixie

Use the CLI to deploy the Pixie Platform in your K8s cluster by running:

px deploy

Alternatively, you can deploy with YAML or Helm.

Check out our install guides and walkthrough videos for alternate install schemes.

Get Instant Auto-Telemetry

Run scripts with px CLI

Service SLA:

px run px/service_stats

Node health:

px run px/node_stats

MySQL metrics:

px run px/mysql_stats

Explore more scripts by running:

px scripts list

Check out our pxl_scripts folder for more examples.

View machine generated dashboards with Live views

The Pixie Platform auto-generates “Live View” dashboard to visualize script results.

You can view them by clicking on the URLs prompted by px or by visiting:

https://work.withpixie.ai/live

Pipe Pixie dust into any tool

You can transform and pipe your script results into any other system or workflow by consuming px results with tools like jq.

Example with http_data:

px run px/http_data -o json| jq -r .

More examples here

To see more script examples and learn how to write your own, check out our docs for more guides

Contributing

Refer to our contribution guide!

Under the Hood

Three fundamental innovations enable Pixie’s magical developer experience:

Progressive Instrumentation: Pixie Edge Modules (“PEMs”) collect full body request traces (via eBPF), system metrics & K8s events without the need for code-changes and at less than 5% overhead. Custom metrics, traces & logs can be integrated into the Pixie Command Module.

In-Cluster Edge Compute: The Pixie Command Module is deployed in your K8s cluster to isolate data storage and computation within your environment for drastically better intelligence, performance & security.

Command Driven Interfaces: Programmatically access data via the Pixie CLI and Pixie UI which are designed ground-up to allow you to run analysis & debug scenarios faster than any other developer tool.

For more information on Pixie Platform’s architecture, check out our docs or overview deck

Resources

About Us

Pixie was started by a San Francisco based startup, Pixie Labs Inc. Our north star is to build a new generation of intelligent products which empower developers to engineer the future. We were acquired by New Relic in 2020.

New Relic, Inc. open sourced Pixie in April 2021.

License

Pixie is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0.

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