# Pixie

Generated on 17 May 2022 from [the Pixie catalog page](https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/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

| Package | Version | License |
|---|---|---|
| [pixie-operator](https://github.com/pixie-io/pixie) | 0.0.25 | [Apache 2.0](https://github.com/pixie-io/pixie/blob/main/LICENSE) |
| [nats](https://github.com/nats-io/nats.go) | 2.4.0 | [Apache 2.0](https://github.com/nats-io/nats.go/blob/main/LICENSE) |

## 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.

[![Deploy to DO](https://www.deploytodo.com/do-btn-blue.svg)](https://cloud.digitalocean.com/kubernetes/clusters/new?addonslug=pixie&nodePools=s-1vcpu-2gb%3A3)

## Creating an App using the API

In addition to creating Pixie using the control panel, you can also use the [DigitalOcean API](https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/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](https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/create-personal-access-token/index.html.md) and replace the `$CLUSTER_NAME` variable with the chosen name for your cluster in the command below.

```shell
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](https://withpixie.ai).
- Or a Pixie account and deployment key on a [self-hosted Pixie Cloud](https://docs.px.dev/installing-pixie/install-guides/self-hosted-pixie/).

## Deploying

1. From the Pixie Cloud UI. Go to Admin > Deployment Keys > New Key. If using [Pixie’s CLI](https://docs.px.dev/using-pixie/using-cli/), run `px deploy-key create`.
2. Update `deployKey` in `values.yml` with the deployKey from above.
3. Run `deploy.sh`.