Cilium Description
Cilium is an open-source tool designed to enhance, secure, and monitor network interactions among container workloads and cloud-native environments, leveraging the groundbreaking Kernel technology known as eBPF. Unlike traditional setups, Kubernetes does not inherently include a Load Balancing solution, which is often left to cloud providers or the networking teams in private cloud settings. By utilizing BGP, Cilium can manage incoming traffic effectively, while also using XDP and eBPF to optimize performance. These combined technologies deliver a powerful and secure load balancing solution. Operating at the kernel level, Cilium and eBPF allow for informed decisions regarding the connectivity of various workloads, whether they reside on the same node or across different clusters. Through the integration of eBPF and XDP, Cilium significantly enhances latency and performance, replacing the need for Kube-proxy altogether, which streamlines operations and improves resource usage. This not only simplifies the network architecture but also empowers developers to focus more on application development rather than infrastructure concerns.
Cilium Alternatives
Grafana
Grafana Labs provides an open and composable observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. Recognized as a 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for Observability Platforms and positioned furthest to the right for Completeness of Vision, Grafana Labs supports over 25M users and 5,000+ customers.
Grafana Cloud delivers the full power of Grafana’s open and composable observability stack—without the overhead of managing infrastructure. As a fully managed SaaS offering from Grafana Labs, it unifies metrics, logs, and traces in one place, giving engineering teams real-time visibility into systems and applications. Built around the LGTM Stack—Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics—Grafana Cloud provides a scalable foundation for modern observability.
With built-in integrations for Kubernetes, cloud services, CI/CD pipelines, and OpenTelemetry, Grafana Cloud accelerates time to value while reducing operational complexity. Grafana Cloud also supports OLAP-style analytics through integrations with data warehouses and analytical engines like BigQuery, ClickHouse, and Druid—enabling multi-dimensional exploration across observability and business data. Teams gain access to powerful features like Adaptive Metrics for cost optimization, incident response workflows, and synthetic monitoring for performance testing—all within a secure, globally distributed platform. Whether you’re modernizing infrastructure, scaling observability, or driving SLO-based performance, Grafana Cloud delivers the insights you need—fast, flexible, and vendor-neutral.
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groundcover
Cloud-based solution for observability that helps businesses manage and track workload and performance through a single dashboard.
Monitor all the services you run on your cloud without compromising cost, granularity or scale. Groundcover is a cloud-native APM solution that makes observability easy so you can focus on creating world-class products. Groundcover's proprietary sensor unlocks unprecedented granularity for all your applications. This eliminates the need for costly changes in code and development cycles, ensuring monitoring continuity.
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KubeArmor
KubeArmor is an open-source, cloud-native security engine that provides runtime enforcement for Kubernetes clusters, containers, and virtual machines, using eBPF and Linux Security Modules such as AppArmor, BPF-LSM, and SELinux. It protects workloads by restricting behaviors like process execution, file operations, networking, and resource consumption, all enforced through customizable, Kubernetes-native policies. Unlike traditional post-attack mitigations that react after malicious activity occurs, KubeArmor’s inline enforcement blocks threats proactively without requiring changes to containers or hosts. Its simplified policy descriptions and non-privileged daemonset architecture make it easy to deploy and manage across diverse environments, including multi-cloud and edge networks. The platform logs policy violations in real time and supports granular network communication controls between containers. Installation can be done effortlessly using Helm charts, with detailed documentation and video guides available. KubeArmor is listed on AWS, Red Hat, Oracle, and DigitalOcean marketplaces, demonstrating broad industry acceptance. It also offers specialized features for IoT, 5G security, and workload sandboxing, making it a versatile choice for modern cloud-native security.
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Tetragon
Tetragon is an adaptable security observability and runtime enforcement tool designed for Kubernetes, leveraging eBPF to implement policies and filtering that minimize observation overhead while enabling the tracking of any process and real-time policy enforcement. With eBPF technology, Tetragon achieves profound observability with minimal performance impact, effectively reducing risks without the delays associated with user-space processing. Building on Cilium's architecture, Tetragon identifies workload identities, including namespace and pod metadata, offering capabilities that exceed conventional observability methods. It provides a selection of pre-defined policy libraries that facilitate quick deployment and enhance operational insights, streamlining both setup time and complexity when scaling. Furthermore, Tetragon actively prevents harmful actions at the kernel level, effectively closing off opportunities for exploitation while avoiding vulnerabilities related to TOCTOU attack vectors. The entire process of synchronous monitoring, filtering, and enforcement takes place within the kernel through the use of eBPF, ensuring a secure environment for workloads. This integrated approach not only enhances security but also optimizes performance across Kubernetes deployments.
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Cilium
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cilium.io
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