Pixie Labs, a Kubernetes observability platform, became generally available two months ago and secured $9.15 million in Series A funding, spearheaded by Benchmark and including GV. Today, the company announced it has been acquired by New Relic, a publicly traded monitoring and observability provider.

The Pixie Labs brand and product will be maintained, enabling New Relic to broaden its platform’s reach to the network edge. The Pixie Labs team initially developed the service with a focus on delivering observability for cloud-native applications operating within Kubernetes clusters. Unlike many comparable solutions geared towards operations and IT professionals, Pixie was created to be a tool developers would actively choose to use. Leveraging eBPF, a modern technique for extending the Linux kernel, the Pixie platform is capable of gathering data directly at its origin, eliminating the need for an agent.

Central to the Pixie developer experience are “Pixie scripts,” which empower developers to define their debugging processes. The company also provides a collection of pre-built scripts, and the community is encouraged to contribute and share their own. This approach aims to formalize and share the practical knowledge surrounding effective service debugging.

“We are incredibly pleased to unite these two companies, as we both strive to make observability universally accessible through simplicity,” stated Bill Staples, New Relic’s chief product officer. “[…] IDC reports there are 28 million developers globally. However, only a small percentage currently utilize observability practices. We believe that every developer should be able to adopt a data-driven approach to software development, and Kubernetes is becoming the primary environment for building software.”

New Relic already offered a solution for monitoring Kubernetes clusters. However, Pixie will significantly enhance its capabilities in this area. “Pixie provides a much more comprehensive solution, offering on-the-edge, real-time debugging capabilities and the ability to execute Pixie scripts. This serves as an extension to our existing cloud-based monitoring solution,” Staples explained.

The intention is to integrate Pixie’s platform with New Relic and to incorporate Pixie’s functionalities into New Relic One.

Approximately 300 teams are currently utilizing the Pixie platform, ranging from small startups to large organizations, with a considerable overlap already existing between the customer bases of both companies, as noted by Staples and Pixie co-founder Zain Asgar.

Asgar, a former Google engineer involved in Google AI and a Stanford adjunct professor, explained that the decision to sell was motivated by a desire to accelerate Pixie’s overall vision.

“Pixie was founded to create a uniquely intuitive developer experience that fundamentally changes how application developers monitor, secure, and manage their applications,” Asgar said. “A key factor in our decision was realizing the strong alignment in vision with the New Relic team, particularly Bill and [New Relic founder and CEO] Lew [Cirne]. By combining forces with New Relic, we can expedite the realization of this vision.”

New Relic has recently focused on open-sourcing various components of its platform, including its agents, data exporters, and certain tools. Pixie will now also open-source its core tools. While open-sourcing was already planned, the acquisition will allow for a faster implementation of this initiative.

“We will be making Pixie available to the community through open source, while also continuing to develop the commercial, enterprise-grade offering that expands the New Relic One platform,” Staples clarified. Asgar added that the release of the code will take some time.

“The same qualities that initially impressed us with Lew as an EIR in 2007, also resonated with Zain and Ishan in 2017 — exceptionally talented engineers who excel at creating products developers love,” commented Eric Vishria, General Partner at Benchmark Ventures. “New Relic has consistently delivered developer satisfaction. Kubernetes fundamentally alters the monitoring landscape we’ve known for decades. Pixie brings the same ease of use, rapid value, and straightforward approach to Kubernetes as New Relic brought to APM. This is a truly synergistic combination.”