Pixie

Pricing and hosting

Pricing

Free

Open source

Yes (Apache-2.0)

Self-hosted

Yes

Launched

2020

Status

Active

Website

px.dev

Plans and prices change; check the tool's own site before you decide.

What it does

Kubernetes and container monitoring checklist

4 of 10 confirmed in Pixie's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Kubernetes.

• + Cluster, node and pod metrics Yes
• ? Kubernetes events Not confirmed
• ? Pod logs Not confirmed
• + Cluster view Yes
• ? Requests and limits advice Not confirmed
• ? Change timeline Not confirmed
• + Network visibility Yes
• x Alerting No
• ? Multi-cluster Not confirmed
• + Runs in your cluster Yes

FAQ states Pixie does not offer alerting (only via API, e.g. Slackbot tutorial). Stores data in-cluster; Pixie Cloud can be self-hosted.

Checked against: github.com, docs.px.dev, docs.px.dev (2)

Tracing and APM checklist

4 of 10 confirmed in Pixie's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Tracing and APM.

• ? Distributed tracing Not confirmed
• ? OTLP traces ingest Not confirmed
• + Service map Yes
• + Auto-instrumentation Yes
• + Database query analysis Yes
• ? Error capture Not confirmed
• ? Latency and error alerts Not confirmed
• ? Trace to log correlation Not confirmed
• ? Sampling controls Not confirmed
• + Code-level detail Yes

eBPF protocol tracing of requests per service; README does not describe distributed traces across services.

Checked against: github.com, docs.px.dev

Continuous profiling checklist

5 of 9 confirmed in Pixie's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Profiling.

• + Always-on in production Yes
• + CPU profiles Yes
• ? Memory or allocation profiles Not confirmed
• + eBPF, no code changes Yes
• + Several languages Yes
• + Flame graph UI Yes
• ? Profile comparison Not confirmed
• ? Linked to traces Not confirmed
• ? OpenTelemetry profiles Not confirmed

Always-on CPU profiler for Go, C++, Rust and Java.

Checked against: docs.px.dev, github.com

Alternatives to Pixie

Other kubernetes and container monitoring tools. See all 25.

• Botkube Kubernetes ChatOps bot that posts cluster events and alerts to Slack, Discord or Mattermost and lets you run kubectl from chat.
• Checkmk Infrastructure monitoring for servers, networks, cloud and containers with automatic service discovery; the base edition is open source and paid editions add more.
• Coroot Open source observability that uses eBPF to build service maps and collect metrics, logs, traces and profiles without code changes, with root-cause hints.
• Dozzle Small web UI that streams and searches live Docker container logs across hosts, with no log storage. Optional Dozzle Cloud adds grouped alerts and log analysis.
• Freelens Community-maintained open source Kubernetes desktop IDE, forked from OpenLens, for managing clusters and viewing workloads, metrics and logs.
• groundcover Kubernetes observability that uses an eBPF sensor and runs in your own cloud account, covering logs, traces, metrics and APM without code changes.
• Headlamp Kubernetes web UI and desktop app, now a Kubernetes SIG UI project, for browsing cluster resources, logs and events, extensible with plugins.
• Inspektor Gadget CNCF project of eBPF-based tools (gadgets) for inspecting and debugging Kubernetes workloads and Linux hosts, from network traces to process and file activity.
• K8sGPT CLI and operator that scans Kubernetes clusters for problems and explains them in plain language using an LLM backend of your choice. CNCF sandbox project.
• Komodor Commercial platform for Kubernetes troubleshooting and operations that tracks changes and health across clusters and uses AI agents to investigate and fix issues.
• Kubeshark Captures and dissects API traffic between Kubernetes pods (HTTP, gRPC, Kafka, DNS and more) so you can inspect requests cluster-wide, like Wireshark for Kubernetes.
• Lens Desktop Kubernetes IDE for browsing clusters, resource metrics and logs across many clusters. Free for individuals and small organizations; paid plans add team and enterprise features.