New Relic Inc. today announced plans to acquire Pixie Labs Inc., a startup with a platform for monitoring Kubernetes workloads that launched from stealth mode just over two months ago.

Pixie Labs launched at the start of October with $9.15 million in initial funding and a platform designed to make it easier to monitor applications running on Kubernetes. Enterprises need to keep an eye on the state of their services to make sure they’re not experiencing any technical issues that may hinder user productivity or customer experience. To do so, they embed special “instrumentation” code into their applications that collects operational data.

Pixie Labs’ technology makes it possible to gather operational data without embedding any extra code into an application. That saves time for developers, especially in large enterprise software projects where dozens or hundreds of components may have to be instrumented. Reducing the amount of code in an application also lowers the risk of bugs.

New Relic’s acquisition of Pixie Labs comes just weeks after Splunk Inc., another major player in the infrastructure observability market, acquired a monitoring startup called Flowmill Inc. for an undisclosed sum. What Pixie Labs and Flowmill have in common is that they both use a relatively new component of Linux called eBPF to collect operational data. Isovalent Inc., another startup that uses eBPF as a core pillar of its product, raised a $29 million funding round between Pixie Labs’ and Flowmill’s acquisition announcements.

Linux is the most popular operating system for running Kubernetes. Its eBPF component, in turn, provides the ability to embed code directly into the operating system kernel and collect low-level operational data about the applications running on top. That capability allows Pixie Labs’ technology to perform monitoring without requiring developers to add instrumentation code to their applications.

New Relic will open-source Pixie Labs’ monitoring platform in the wake of the deal. For customers that don’t wish to set up and maintain their own deployment of the platform, New Relic will offer a more user-friendly managed version delivered from the cloud. It will also provide a third flavor, dubbed Enterprise Edition, with additional features aimed at big organizations in sectors such as telecommunications.

“Pixie runs entirely inside Kubernetes as a distributed machine data system, meaning you don’t need to transfer any data outside the cluster,” New Relic Chief Executive Officer Lew Cirne (pictured) wrote in a blog post. In other words, privacy-conscious customers don’t have to send data to the cloud.  “Optionally, if customers choose to send their Pixie-generated telemetry data to New Relic One [the company’s flagship monitoring product] in the future, they’ll gain features including advanced correlation, intelligent alerting, powerful visualizations, and scalable data retention.”

New Relic didn’t disclose the deal’s financial terms. That the company is acquiring Pixie Labs just over two months after the startup’s launch from stealth indicates that it sees significant potential in its technology, which was no doubt reflected in the acquisition price. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE