Mackerel vs Pixie

Mackerel is a cloud-based SaaS service for monitoring servers and team-managed infrastructure. Installing its agent starts monitoring, after which hosts can be grouped into services and roles. It visualizes host metrics and user-defined service measures, including response time, sales and page views. Monitoring features include combining metrics, tracking predicted values and machine-learning anomaly detection. Cloud integrations cover Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud; a container agent treats Amazon ECS tasks and Kubernetes pods as hosts. Users can extend monitoring with open-source plugins, APIs and the mkr command-line tool. Customer Reliability Engineers can offer technical guidance on implementation and use, while standard-plan technical support is email-only. The free plan has five standard and micro hosts total, 500 metrics, one-day retention, 10 monitoring rules, one dashboard and up to 5M trace spans. A two-week trial includes Standard-plan functions and a 100M-span allowance. Standard host usage costs 2,180 yen, tax included, per host month.

Pixie is open-source Kubernetes observability and debugging software for developers. It collects metrics, events, traces, and logs without code changes, using dynamic eBPF probes and ingestors. Users can run community, team, or custom scripts to debug as code and share sessions. Its CLI provides health checks and charts, with a browser interface available when needed. Pixie supports hosted and self-hosted deployments; its Vizier data-collection component runs in the Kubernetes cluster. Requirements include Kubernetes v1.21 or later and Linux nodes, and pods that install BPF programs need privileged access to the Linux kernel. The project lists Cosmic Cloud and New Relic Cloud as free hosted versions. Pixie lists Minikube, EKS, GKE, AKS, and self-managed Kubernetes environments. Telemetry traffic is encrypted in transit. The requirements page says telemetry passes through Pixie Cloud without persistence, while the install guide says hosted-backend telemetry data is stored exclusively on the Kubernetes cluster, not in Pixie Cloud. Listed unsupported environments include EKS Fargate, GKE Autopilot, Docker Desktop, k3d, kind, and Windows. Help options include Community Slack, a troubleshooting guide, and GitHub issues.