Pixie Community Plugins

This repository is for community-submitted plugins for the Pixie Plugin system. The Pixie Plugin system allows other tools to provide additional capabilities within Pixie:

• Long-term Data Retention: Pixie is designed for a real-time debugging use-case and does not guarantee data storage for over 24 hours. Leverage an external datastore for long-term data retention by sending Pixie data in the OpenTelemetry format. Future support will be added for querying long-term data from within the Pixie UI, allowing you to use PxL and Pixie's versatile live views.
• Alerts (Coming Soon!): Power alerts using Pixie's rich dataset, all configurable from within Pixie's UI.

For any questions, reach out to us on Slack.

Available Plugins

Name	Type	Description	Tutorial
New Relic	Long-term Data Retention	Send Pixie data formatted in the OpenTelemetry format to New Relic's OpenTelemetry endpoint for long-term data retention, dashboarding, alerting and more.	link
OpenTelemetry	Long-term Data Retention	Send Pixie data formatted in the OpenTelemetry format to any OpenTelemetry collector.	link

Contributing

Submitting a plugin

To submit plugin, please do the following:

1. Review our Code of Conduct.
2. Test your plugin following the directions here.
3. Submit a pull request to this repository. Don't forget to update this README file to add your plugin to the table of Available Plugins.

Once submitted, your pull request will be carefully reviewed by the Pixie maintainers to ensure it meets quality and security standards.

Plugin Format

Plugins should be added as a directory within /plugins directory. The name of the directory should match the plugin's ID. For example: /plugins/cool-plugin for a plugin with the ID cool-plugin. A plugin consists of the following:

plugin.yaml

This YAML contains general configuration information about the plugin. This contains basic metadata which informs how the plugin is presented within Pixie and which features it supports.

Field	Type	Required	Description
name	string	true	Human-readable name for the plugin
id	string	true	Unique identifier for the plugin
description	string	true	A description about the plugin
logo	object	false	SVG images that should be used for the plugin icon
version	string	true	Version of the plugin. Should follow semVer.
updated	string	true	Date when the plugin version was released
keywords	string[]	false	Keywords that can be used to search for the plugin
dataRetentionEnabled	boolean	true	Whether or not this plugin supports long-term data retention

retention.yaml

This should be provided only if the plugin supports long-term data retention.

Field	Type	Required	Description
documentationURL	string	false	URL that can be used to direct user to documentation about data retention (on the plugin provider’s side)
configurations	map[string]string	false	A list of configurable values that should be presented to the user upon enabling the plugin. Key: The name of the configuration field. Value: A description for the configuration field. These fields will be attached to the context metadata in the GRPC export call.
defaultExportURL	string	true	URL which the OTel data should be exported to. This is expected to host the OTel GRPC service.
allowCustomExportURL	boolean	false	Let the user provide a custom export URL.
allowInsecureTLS	boolean	false	Allow the user to connect to the export URL with an insecure SSL connection.
presetScripts	object[]	false	A set of scripts, prewritten by the plugin provider, which they can use to provide extra functionality.

Note: We recommend that sensitive configuration fields, such as API keys, be scoped to only required permissions for writing to the datastore.

The presetScripts object should adhere to the following format:

Field	Type	Required	Description
name	string	true	The name of the script, displayed to the user.
description	string	false	A description about what the script exports, and the extra functionality it powers.
script	string	true	The PxL script.
defaultFrequencyS	int	false	The default interval, in seconds, at which the script should be rerun. The user has the ability to change this interval if they wish.
defaultDisabled	boolean	false	Whether the preset script should be disabled by default.

Testing a Plugin

Your plugin should be manually tested prior to submission.

1. Create a fork of this repo.
2. Add the necessary files for your plugin (See Plugin Format above).
3. Fork the official Pixie repo.
4. Update k8s/cloud/public/plugin_db_updater_job.yaml's PL_PLUGIN_REPO environment variable to point to your plugin repo fork.
5. Deploy self-hosted Pixie Cloud by following this guide. These steps will automatically pull your plugin into Pixie Cloud's database.
6. Verify that your plugin appears in the Plugins page in the Admin UI.
7. Deploy a Vizier, enable the plugin, and validate that behavior is as expected.