In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud-native observability, groundcover is emerging as a game-changing platform that's redefining how engineering teams gain insights into their complex production environments. At the forefront of this innovation is Yechezkel Rabinovich, CTO and Co-Founder, who is pioneering a unique approach that leverages the powerful but often underutilized technology of eBPF.

In an exclusive VMblog interview, Rabinovich offers a deep dive into groundcover's revolutionary approach to application performance monitoring (APM), highlighting how their platform addresses long-standing challenges in observability. By combining an innovative eBPF sensor, a bring-your-own-cloud architecture, and a volume-agnostic pricing model, groundcover is challenging the status quo of traditional monitoring solutions.

Yechezkel Rabinovich:  groundcover is a modern-day, full-stack observability platform and the only APM solution which utilizes an eBPF sensor, coupled with a bring your own cloud ‘inCloud' architecture and a volume-agnostic pricing model to allow users to gain granular insights into their entire production, at scale.

Getting a full-stack observability platform including log management, infrastructure monitoring, and application performance monitoring is hard to achieve in a scalable manner with existing solutions due to configuration complications, siloed visibility, superficiality of data, volume-based pricing models and vendor lock-ins.

groundcover's eBPF sensor, BYOC inCloud deployment and volume-agnostic pricing model creates a triple-threat "no brainer" alternative that redefines the cloud-native observability space.

VMblog:  How popular is eBPF technology out in the real world? What are the main reasons companies have yet to adopt it?

Rabinovich:  eBPF is a Linux superpower that makes it possible to run sandboxed programs within kernel space with limited resource consumption and unprecedented granularity.

eBPF's dynamic functionality supports a wide range of use cases, from performance monitoring, to networking observability and security (to name a few). Over the course of the past decade, it has become a prominent and increasingly popular technology in the cybersecurity space, especially in the areas of network monitoring, observability, and security enforcement. These use cases have been most notably adopted by organizations like Netflix, Meta, Cilium, Sysdig, Falco, GKE, Crowdstrike, Cisco, and Palo Alto.

eBPF adoption is trending and commoditizing rapidly. The number of projects and tools incorporating eBPF is expanding, particularly in the cloud-native, container, and microservices environments. Major security vendors are increasingly integrating eBPF into their offerings, and its use in both large enterprises and startups is becoming widespread. The open-source community, as well as commercial solutions, have embraced eBPF, contributing to its rapid adoption in various use cases, especially in modern security tools.

As one of the earliest innovators to identify the potential of eBPF for cloud-native observability, groundcover pioneers the reinvention of the space by adapting it to the APM domain to create a zero instrumentation, zero code change solution without compromising on security or efficiency.

While eBPF has enormous potential for revolutionizing observability and APM by offering deep, high-performance visibility into systems, its adoption has been slow due to factors like complexity, maturity, and integration challenges with existing tooling. As eBPF-based observability solutions like groundcover continue to mature and become more standardized, we can expect faster adoption in the APM space in the coming years.

VMblog:  OpenTelemetry is a very popular open source project for Observability. groundcover just announced a deep integration that helps eliminate the blind spots that can frustrate engineers when it comes to OTel. Can you explain how this integration works?

Rabinovich:  By combining the power of OpenTelemetry's distributed tracing with the deep observability of eBPF, we are delivering a comprehensive solution that eliminates blind spots and provides teams with complete, instant visibility into their applications.

With this new integration, engineers no longer need to toggle between separate tools and dashboards. OpenTelemetry lets you trace which services are communicating with each other, mapping out the flow of requests across your system. In addition to basic trace information, eBPF enables deeper intelligence-such as the actual payload of the request and response, the protocol headers and any relevant protocol errors. This level of detail was previously hard to access without using multiple tools. Now, all of this data is accessible through groundcover's intuitive UI.

VMblog:  In simple terms, can you highlight a few of the key benefits companies will get by bringing the power of OpenTelemetry and groundcover together?

Rabinovich:  With this integration, engineering teams can gain complete visibility across their stack, from the kernel to user space, while automatically collecting observability data and reducing the need for manual instrumentation. By leveraging OpenTelemetry's flexible distributed tracing alongside eBPF's rich insights, all within a single platform, teams can streamline their observability approach and eliminate the hassle of managing proprietary agents, offering the freedom to standardize their observability strategy.

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