New Relic Buys Pixie Labs

December 11, 2020

New Relic has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Pixie Labs, a next generation machine intelligence observability solution for developers using Kubernetes. Pixie dramatically simplifies the process of troubleshooting and live debugging applications in Kubernetes environments by providing instant access to telemetry data without the need to manually add instrumentation to the code. The anticipated addition of Pixie will expand New Relic’s opportunity to serve the rapidly growing Kubernetes market, and drive the acceleration of observability across organizations of every size.

Modern developers are adopting Kubernetes as the de facto standard for managing containerized workloads on premises and in the cloud. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation recently reported that 83% of survey respondents use Kubernetes in production, up from 58% in 2018. Yet, software engineering teams consistently struggle to troubleshoot, debug, and gain visibility into applications running in Kubernetes clusters.

Pixie Labs’ technology significantly simplifies observability for Kubernetes environments. With Pixie, telemetry data runs entirely inside Kubernetes at the edge. This first-of-its-kind approach provides telemetry to developers with lower overhead, latency, and costs. New Relic plans to integrate the best of Pixie use cases with New Relic One, where customers will gain access to powerful features, including advanced correlation and alerting with Applied Intelligence, advanced visualization and analytics with Full Stack Observability, and extended data retention and compliance through Telemetry Data Platform. Pixie’s technology will complement New Relic’s powerful Kubernetes observability features in New Relic One available today, including the Kubernetes Cluster Explorer.

More than 300 engineering teams are using the Pixie beta today at companies ranging from startups to enterprises running internet-scale Kubernetes clusters.