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.
Table of contents
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 defaultdockerdriver is not currently supported, so using thekvm2driver 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 Weaveworks' sock-shop demo app by running
px demo deploy px-sock-shop
🚀 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.