Traditional monitoring and o11y were defined by the painstaking process of manual instrumentation—an inconsistent and error-prone effort, especially with the rise of cloud environments. eBPF promised a breakthrough, introducing auto-instrumentation that could eliminate these challenges. When the magic of eBPF works, it’s transformative, but there are times where its auto instrumentation comes up empty. Rigid, black box tooling is frustrating—at its best it’s magical and at its worst it’s distrusted quickly.

What if eBPF provided a “batteries included but removable” experience, enabling engineers to customize o11y to their needs? In this talk, we’ll discuss how CNCF Pixie and Inspektor Gadget provide the right abstraction for unlocking eBPF’s full potential with their powerful post-processing and k8s enrichment capabilities. We’ll also explore how this vision transformed Pixie’s data collector into a universal agent that can power observability pipelines like Fluentbit and Vector.