Groundcover aims to improve observability and monitoring with eBPF and microservices

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Groundcover aims to improve Kubenetes observability through application monitoring with eBPF and microservices

More and more organizations are digitally transforming and migrating their workloads to the cloud. However, successfully building applications in the cloud requires a comprehensive view of development pipelines, workflows to deployment, and more. A major challenge that development teams have faced over the years is how to effectively detect and resolve issues that arise along their production pipelines, resulting in an increased need for application performance monitoring ( APM) more agile. That's why observability and monitoring are critical to application development, management, and performance.

The problem, however, is that many IT teams still rely on traditional monitoring tools that are often slow and inflexible. It is this problem that the Israeli startup Groundcover wants to solve by combining eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter) and a microservices architecture. Groundcover claims it redefines traditional application monitoring by enabling IT teams to monitor and resolve issues in their application pipelines in record time.

Yechezkel Rabinovich, CTO and co-founder of Groundcover, told VentureBeat that Groundcover approaches application monitoring from a new angle, using an eBPF-based agent and distributed computing to improve application observability.

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register here Groundcover's approach to observability

eBPF is a technology designed to run sandboxed programs in the Linux kernel without having to manipulate kernel behavior or load kernel modules. Basically, it lets you run sandboxed programs using your operating system. With the ability to make the Linux kernel programmable, developers have a wide range of tools to make their jobs easier.

Given the complexity of software monitoring, it has become essential to redesign the process, resulting in an architectural bridge between eBPF and microservices, which provide a more refined application monitoring process.

eBPF became a staple of the Linux kernel in 2014 as an extension of the original Berkeley Packet Filter, introduced in 1993. Nearly three decades later, it has evolved to cover more use cases in more a dozen projects. With Kubernetes playing an important role in managing individual application containers today, the approach to monitoring and observability must change to reflect today's realities.

Groundcover's promise is to offer a new approach that helps developers up their Kubernetes observability game with eBPF. Rabinovich said Groundcover's solution could instantly identify bleeding issues in production and troubleshoot them quickly, all without any code changes.

Evolve with an ever-changing application monitoring industry

Underlining the changes in the industry and the need for organizations to evolve accordingly, Rabinovich said that organizations that depend on a traditional observability strategy for distributed applications end up facing what h ...