FAQ

How much does groundcover cost?

groundcover's unique pricing model is the first to decouple data volumes from cost of owning and operating the solution. For example, subscribing to our Enterprise plan costs $30 per node/host per month.

Overall, the cost of owning and operating groundcover is based on two factors:

• The number of nodes (hosts) you are running in the environment you are monitoring

• The costs of hosting groundcover's backend in your environment

Check out our TCO calculator to simulate your total cost of ownership for groundcover.

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.

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 kernel-level eBPF sensor automatically collects your logs, application metrics (such as latency, throughput, error rate and much more), infrastructure metrics (such as deployment updates, container crashes etc.), traces, and Kubernetes events. You can control which data is left out of the automatic collection using data obfuscation.

Where is my data being stored?

groundcover stores all the data it collects inside your environment, using the state-of-the-art storage services of ClickHouse and Victoria Metrics, with the option to offload data to object storage such as S3 for long-term retention. See our Architecture section for more details.

Is my data secure?

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.

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 invites 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.