Groundcover announces eBPF-powered observability for Kubernetes with one-click dashboards

Bart: Welcome to KubeFM. Can you tell us who you are, what's your role, and where do you work?

Shahar: My name is Shahar Azulay, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of GroundCover.

Bart: What news would you like to share with our community today?

(No specific hyperlinks were needed in this transcript excerpt, as there are no technical terms or specific references that match the provided links.)

Shahar: GroundCover has been operating for a while, reinventing observability for cloud-native environments with eBPF, which is a great technology. With hundreds of customers, we've created an all-in-one observability platform that covers logs, metrics, and traces. eBPF provides deep observability built into the Linux kernel and the ability to comprehensively monitor environments.

Recently, we've used eBPF as a sensor to create one-click dashboards and alerting for the Kubernetes infrastructure layer. By installing the GroundCover sensor, you get data and visualizations out of the box. The eBPF data allows you to easily visualize and troubleshoot your cloud-native environment without complex dashboard setup or learning intricate query languages.

Bart: I want to unpack this as a bonus question. How does observability without eBPF look?

Shahar: Without eBPF, you go back to a traditional integration model where the infrastructure layer and application layer running on Kubernetes are separated domains. You might use one agent to run infrastructure monitoring, scrape metrics, or collect information from the Kubernetes API, and have a completely different approach on the application layer—perhaps using an OpenTelemetry SDK or choosing not to instrument at all.

This creates an unnecessary dichotomy. Some teams might use technologies that work well together, while others might be less proficient. Correlating this data becomes complex, depending on what you've instrumented and the technologies used to cover infrastructure and application layers.

eBPF unifies this approach. There's no difference between infrastructure and application because it's baked into the Linux kernel, seeing through to user space. We can have insights from infrastructure—like Kubernetes events or pod resource consumption metrics—and immediately tie those to traces or logs from the application layer, without any instrumentation or code changes.

This provides an excellent out-of-the-box experience. By simply installing a DaemonSet on a Kubernetes cluster, you can see logs, metrics, and traces across the entire stack. Moreover, everything is beautifully correlated because the same sensor and technology collect all data simultaneously, allowing for deeper context and understanding.

Bart: With that in mind, I also want to ask a bonus question. Since you mentioned the point about observability teams, how much of observability is a people problem versus a technical problem?

Shahar: Observability is currently built in a way that creates an unhealthy organizational back-and-forth. Infrastructure and DevOps teams are the only ones who can make complex decisions about their technology stack. Running an observability stack in a production environment has significant impacts, and these teams need to choose carefully.

They rely on developers to instrument code and emit the right logs, metrics, and traces. While this collaboration sounds good in theory, it's extremely challenging in large organizations. eBPF helps to simplify this process, allowing infrastructure teams to do more simultaneously.

With focused professionals, great observability is achievable. However, today it's mostly an organizational problem that prevents technology adoption. We see this with OpenTelemetry—a great project that requires numerous stakeholders and often feels like a never-ending journey.

The goal is to minimize involvement for non-observability engineers who are primarily focused on building their product. Technologies like eBPF, which are frictionless and work out-of-band for developers, are likely to gain traction because they provide value without excessive complexity. Currently, these organizational challenges are slowing down observability adoption.

Bart: Now, what's the specific pain point or problem that one-click dashboards with eBPF is solving?

Shahar: People are not exactly familiar with Kubernetes as you might expect. They're using this platform because they know it's the right technology, relying on the trend of cloud-native microservices and Kubernetes. They believe that if they make a decision now, it will provide the flexibility they'll need in two years.

However, there are many pain points. How do applications interconnect and consume resources from a node? They have interdependencies, and some applications might interfere with others, causing latencies. It's challenging to correctly provision resources for pods and hosts inside a cluster.

We use eBPF technology to provide visualization out of the box with an opinionated approach that helps you observe Kubernetes without being a power user who understands every technical detail. eBPF allows us to see through the entire stack, from infrastructure to application.

We can create context in dashboards and generate meaningful alerts, such as pod crashes, unavailable deployments, pod resource utilization, or pods approaching memory limits. Essentially, we're combining our cloud-native observability expertise with technology that can gather data with minimal effort, creating a one-click dashboard experience.

Bart: I noticed that the transcript snippet you provided is incomplete. Could you provide the full transcript text so I can properly analyze and hyperlink relevant terms?

Shahar: Before we released these native one-click dashboards, people could still get this data, but they would have to dig deeper about the metrics they want to explore, how they want to visualize them, and what is important to them. We took it one step further by offering visualizations and monitors that we think are relevant for Kubernetes and cloud-native monitoring, baking them into the Groundcover experience together with eBPF technology. This allows our customers to get value quickly, all the way to the visualizations.

Bart: As an aside, are there any plans to donate this to the CNCF, or is that not really in the cards right now?

Shahar: eBPF is an open source project pushed by the Linux community. We definitely believe in open source. However, our dashboards and our utilization of eBPF are not open source right now. As part of the community, the technology will be relevant for everybody. We contribute where we can. Specifically, GroundCover itself and its way of utilizing eBPF is not open source.

Bart: I noticed that the transcript you provided is actually empty or incomplete. Could you share the specific transcript section that needs to be edited and hyperlinked? Without the actual text, I cannot apply the guidelines or create hyperlinks.

Shahar: GroundCover has a very unique pricing model. We use a technology called Bring Your Own Cloud, which, regardless of the eBPF data collection, provides a completely unique way to process and store data. We store it on our customers' cloud premises and manage it like a SaaS experience. This means the data resides in your VPC, remaining secure and private, while eliminating data transfer and storage costs to a third-party vendor.

We are the only observability company that prices by data volume. Instead, we price only by the number of hosts or Kubernetes nodes covered with our eBPF sensor. This approach provides a frictionless, high-coverage solution where data is unlimited, regardless of retention or usage, because we built a technology around storing data on your premises.

This model allows customers to get 10x more value for the same price and offers a much more predictable pricing structure compared to unpredictable models based on data volume or gigabytes per second. We also offer a free tier that is fully self-served, allowing people to easily try out the product.

Bart: And who are GroundCover's main competitors?

Potential competitors mentioned include:

• Datadog

• New Relic

• Grafana Cloud

The context suggests these are observability and monitoring platforms, likely competing in the space of collecting logs, metrics, and traces using technologies like eBPF.

Shahar: GroundCover competes with legacy big vendors in the market. We compete with Datadog, New Relic, and Grafana Cloud. These are the competitors we see. We replace them with all of our customers, providing end-to-end log management, infrastructure monitoring, and APM. Basically, that's our North Star and competitive base when helping customers today.

Bart: And what differentiates GroundCover from the competition?

Shahar: We're the only vendor that is eBPF-first. We rely on eBPF to provide our full experience from logs, metrics, and traces to the full APM experience. Everything we provide is out of the box with a 60-second installation, which is a very unique approach. Unlike legacy solutions that require code changes and instrumentation across different technologies, we offer a simpler solution.

We're built on a bring-your-own-cloud architecture, not a pure SaaS model. This allows us to price and package the product differently. We're a single product where you get all the value at once. In contrast, Datadog, New Relic, and other vendors charge separately for log management, infrastructure monitoring, and APM. You have to pick and choose what you pay for, and those prices accumulate quickly.

At GroundCover, you get all features all the time with a host-based pricing model and unlimited data. This is how we're fundamentally different from the competition.

Bart: And in terms of the end users that are benefiting from GroundCover and the technology you're providing, leveraging eBPF, do they fit a certain profile from a certain sector? Are there any common characteristics that they have?

Shahar: We can see GroundCover appealing to a wide range of customers. From small startups choosing their first observability vendor and seeking a cloud-native, modern solution, to Fortune 100 companies replacing Datadog and New Relic at high scales. These larger enterprises are often frustrated with existing pricing models and limitations on data storage. They are attracted to GroundCover because of its eBPF technology, which provides extreme coverage and value. We see customers across this entire spectrum.

Bart: Thank you very much for sharing your time with us today. I look forward to the next steps.

Shahar: Thanks for having me.