Pixie is a Kubernetes observability tool that uses eBPF to capture application telemetry without code instrumentation or sidecars. It was created by Pixie Labs, acquired by New Relic in 2020, and donated to the CNCF sandbox in 2021.
A Pixie deployment runs the Vizier agent as a DaemonSet on each node. Vizier attaches eBPF probes to kernel tracepoints, uprobes, and kprobes to capture HTTP, gRPC, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DNS, Kafka, Redis, and TLS traffic directly off the socket layer, as well as CPU profiles via perf_events. All captured data is stored in an in-memory columnar store on each node rather than shipped to a central backend, which keeps egress costs low and lets queries run against the last few minutes of full-fidelity traffic. A separate cloud control plane coordinates clusters and hosts the UI.
Queries are written in PxL, a Pythonic DataFrame-style language that compiles to a distributed execution plan across Vizier agents. Pixie ships with scripts for service maps, HTTP latency breakdowns, database query profiling, and flame graphs out of the box. It can export data to OpenTelemetry collectors and is often paired with Grafana or New Relic for long-term storage, with Pixie handling the live, high-cardinality layer that traditional APM agents would otherwise need instrumentation for.