ElastiFlow Announces General Availability of Mermin, Eliminating the Kubernetes Network Blind Spot with OpenTelemetry-Native Observability

ATLANTA, Feb. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — ElastiFlow, the leader in open network observability, today announced the General Availability (GA) of Mermin. Purpose-built for DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) professionals, Mermin provides the missing link in Kubernetes observability by delivering vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry (OTel) traces that correlate application performance with the underlying network layer.

ElastiFlow launches Mermin: open source, OpenTelemetry-native, eBPF tool to auto-instrument Kubernetes network traffic.

While Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools provide visibility into application performance, they’re largely blind to the network. When a service experiences high latency, this blind spot often leads DevOps teams to assume it’s the network, while NetOps teams lack the application context to determine the impact of a high latency event. Mermin ends this friction by providing a unified, real-time source of truth.

“DevOps teams have been managing network complexity with one hand tied behind their back,” says Sven Cowart, Co-Founder at ElastiFlow. “Mermin ends the guesswork by delivering OTel-native visibility that identifies, in seconds, whether a slow response is a deployment issue or a network bottleneck.”

Bridging the Kubernetes Observability Gap

Mermin leverages lightweight, eBPF-powered technology to understand network traffic within Kubernetes clusters without requiring intrusive sidecars or manual code instrumentation. Key features include:

• Automated Kubernetes Enrichment: Automatically enriches flow traces with K8s metadata like pod and service names, and allows for custom tagging to always have valuable business context.
• OTel-Native Design: Mermin exports data as OTel traces using the flow semantic convention, seamlessly integrating with existing tools including Grafana, OpenSearch, and DataDog.
• Bidirectional Flow Analysis: Captures both directions of a conversation (client-to-server and server-to-client), allowing teams to understand the full nature of traffic, such as a small request followed by a large download

Empowering the Modern DevOps Engineer

In an era when “every DevOps engineer is now a network expert,” Mermin provides the required insights in an easily accessible and actionable way. By providing real-time, contextualized visibility, Mermin enables ops teams to take immediate action, optimize infrastructure, enhance security posture, control costs, and ship code faster.

“The network is often the ‘dark matter’ of Kubernetes,” said Cowart. “With Mermin, we are making that matter visible, actionable, and integrated into the tools engineers already use and love.”

Availability

Get started today by visiting the Mermin docs or exploring the project on GitHub.

To learn more about how Mermin is closing the Kubernetes observability gap, read the latest on the ElastiFlow Blog.

About ElastiFlow

ElastiFlow’s observability solutions provide real-time, contextualized visibility into all services and applications that operations teams need to take immediate action and ship faster. By transforming complex network telemetry into actionable insights, ElastiFlow empowers DevOps, SRE, and NetOps teams to manage modern infrastructure with confidence. Their vendor-neutral approach ensures that organizations can maintain data sovereignty while using the industry-leading tools of their choice.

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SOURCE ElastiFlow