Open Observability for All 

Cloud computing and the rise of microservices architecture bring a wide range of benefits to software development, but the dynamic, distributed nature of these environments presents a new set of observability challenges. We believe an open source, community-driven approach is the best way to address these challenges.

Observability should work out-of-the-box, be on by default, and use open standards. That’s why I am excited by the bold steps we are taking today to make observability open, frictionless, and part of every developer workflow.

Observability and the CNCF

Today we announce that New Relic is a platinum member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). CNCF is part of the Linux Foundation and promotes the collaborative development of open source, cloud native computing and serves as the vendor-neutral home for many of the open source projects that are defining industry best practices, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry.

With today’s announcement, Zain Asgar, GM of Pixie and New Relic Open Source, is joining the CNCF governing board, and we are committed to providing governance, thought leadership, and engineering resources to help shape and influence the direction of cloud native observability. We are proud to be the first observability vendor to pledge this level of commitment to the community.

Pixie is now open source

We have also open sourced Pixie, and we are in the process of contributing it to CNCF under an Apache 2.0 license. When we acquired Pixie Labs in December 2020, we were enthralled by the instant visibility this platform delivers for cloud native applications without any code changes.

In 2008, New Relic was the first SaaS company that enabled engineers to instantly monitor their Ruby applications. It was a magical moment, and today Pixie redelivers this experience. With one command, you can light up your entire cloud environment and get telemetry immediately. We believe all developers should get access to this phenomenal developer experience that reduces friction to observability and saves valuable time that you can use for developing better software. To make that happen, we are also devoting a majority of Pixie’s engineering resources to this open source project.

Our commitment to open source and CNCF extends beyond our platinum membership, governing board seat, and Pixie contribution. All our instrumentation agents, integrations, and SDKs are available in open source, giving developers access to our turnkey instrumentation so they can customize to their needs. OpenTelemetry is the instrumentation standard going forward in New Relic. To make it easy to adopt this open standard of instrumentation, we are providing a native OpenTelemetry protocol endpoint to ingest data and curated, first-class out-of-the-box user experiences that simplify analysis and troubleshooting. New Relic is also a founding member of Eclipse Adoptium, a leading provider of fully compatible, high-quality distributions of Java runtimes based on OpenJDK source codes.

Pixie on AWS

We are on a mission to make observability part of every developer’s workflow and we can’t do that alone. Last fall, we announced a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS to accelerate innovation and cloud migration for our shared customers. We are excited to extend our collaboration with AWS on Pixie, to provide Pixie Open Source on AWS Cloud. Get started today with Pixie on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

We are all in on open source

We believe in the power of open source. That’s why we are joining the governing board of CNCF and making a bold bet by open sourcing Pixie. We know what a dedicated team of engineers working in open collaboration can achieve, and we’re excited to play a part in shaping the future of open source observability.