Pixie

Pixie is an open source observability tool for Kubernetes applications. Use Pixie to view the high-level state of your cluster (service maps, cluster resources, application traffic) and also drill-down into more detailed views (pod state, flame graphs, individual full-body application requests).

Three features enable Pixie’s magical developer experience:

• Auto-telemetry: Pixie uses eBPF to automatically collect telemetry data such as full-body requests, resource and network metrics, application profiles, and more.
• In-Cluster Edge Compute: Pixie collects, stores and queries all telemetry data locally in the cluster. Pixie uses less than 5% of cluster CPU, and in most cases less than 2%.
• Scriptability: PxL, Pixie’s flexible Pythonic query language, can be used across Pixie’s UI, CLI, and client APIs.

Software Included

Creating an App using the Control Panel

Click the Deploy to DigitalOcean button to install a Kubernetes 1-Click Application. If you aren’t logged in, this link will prompt you to log in with your DigitalOcean account.

Creating an App using the API

In addition to creating Pixie using the control panel, you can also use the DigitalOcean API. As an example, to create a 3 node DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster made up of Basic Droplets in the SFO2 region, you can use the following doctl command. You need to authenticate with doctl with your API access token) and replace the $CLUSTER_NAME variable with the chosen name for your cluster in the command below.

doctl kubernetes clusters create --size s-4vcpu-8gb $CLUSTER_NAME --1-clicks pixie

Getting Started After Deploying Pixie

Prerequisites

You must have either:

• You need to have a Pixie account and deployment key on Community Cloud for Pixie.
• Or a Pixie account and deployment key on a self-hosted Pixie Cloud.

Deploying

1. From the Pixie Cloud UI. Go to Admin > Deployment Keys > New Key. If using Pixie’s CLI, run px deploy-key create.
2. Update deployKey in values.yml with the deployKey from above.
3. Run deploy.sh.