FAQ

What is groundcover?

groundcover is a modern application monitoring solution based on a technology called eBPF, that makes complete cloud observability easy.

How is groundcover different?

Legacy APM solutions were built at a time when engineering teams were mostly working on single-tiered monolith applications that combined user-facing interfaces and data access into a single platform.

These solutions suffer from two major limitations:

• They require manual R&D labor Requiring developers to instrument their code.

• They collect everything and send it back to one centralized place. This approach isn't built for scale and in today’s micro-services architectures less than 1% of this data is ever queried. The other 99% is collected, stored, processed but never used.

groundcover uses eBPF to make integration a breeze. No more code changes. It just works.

groundcover also reduces high volumes of data intro metrics without the data being moved and stored. By transforming random sampling into smart capturing, we capture the 1% you care about - making it easier to troubleshoot at the speed of your scale.

How much does it cost?

groundcover is the first APM solution of its kind. Our well-distributed and economic architecture allows us to break the customary volume-based pricing model, offering a solution at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.

groundcover is free of charge for a full free-tier of up to three seats and one K8s cluster. Check out our pricing page for more details.

What K8s flavors are supported?

groundcover has been tested and validated on the most common K8s distributions. See full list in the Requirements section.

What protocols are supported?

groundcover supports the most common protocols in most K8s production environments out-of-the-box. See full list here.

What types of data does groundcover collect?

groundcover's mission is to cover your entire K8s stack with no code changes or configurations. We collect anything from K8s events (deployment updates, container crashes etc.) to logs, metrics (latency, throughput, error rate and much more) and traces.

Where is my data being stored?

groundcover stores the data it collects in-cluster, inside your environment. Our default deployment is built so no data ever leaves your cluster. See the Architecture section for more details.

Is my data secured?

groundcover stores the data it collects in-cluster, inside your environment without ever leaving the cluster to be stored anywhere else.

Our SaaS UI experience stores only information related to the account, user access and general K8s metadata used for governance (like the number of nodes per cluster, the name given to the cluster etc.).

All the information served to the UI experience is encrypted all the way to the in-cluster data sources. groundcover has no access to your collected data, which is accessible only to an authenticated user from your organization. groundcover does collect telemetry information (opt-out is of course possible) which includes metrics about the performance of the deployment (e.g. resource consumption metrics) and logs reported from the groundcover components running in the cluster. All telemetry information is anonymized, and contains no data related to your environment.

Regardless, groundcover is SOC2 and ISO 27001 compliant and follows best practices.

Can I use groundcover across multiple clusters?

Definitely. As you deploy groundcover each cluster is automatically assigned the unique name it holds inside your cloud environment. You can browse and select all your clusters at one place with our UI experience.

How can I invite my team to my workspace?

If you used your business email to create your groundcover account, you can invite your team to your workspace by clicking on the purple "Invite" button on the upper menu. This will open a pop-up where you can enter the emails of the people you want to invite. You also have an option to copy and share your private link.

Note: The Admin of the account (i.e. the person that created it) can also invite users outside of your email domain. Non-admin users can only invite users that share the same email domain. If you used a private email, you can only share the link to your workspace by clicking the "Share" button on the top bar.

Read more about sharing in our installation guide.

Is groundcover Open Source?

groundcover's CLI tool is currently Open Source along side more projects like Murre and Caretta. We're working on releasing more parts of our solution to Open Source very soon. Stay tuned in our GitHub page!

What operating system (OS) do I need to use groundcover?

groundcover’s sensor uses eBPF, which means it can only deployed on a Kubernetes cluster that is running on a Linux system.

Installing using the CLI command is currently only supported on Linux and Mac.

You can install using the Helm command from any operating system.

Once installed, accessing the groundcover platform is possible from any web browser, on any operating system.