Cloud is virtual. As we know, there are no actual computing clouds, the term is used to denote a defined instance of compute capacity and storage (along with other constantly expanding and proliferating services from analytics to AI and so on) located in a datacenter and connected to users over predominantly web-based service links. When the network engineers first envisaging cloud drew their swirly-bubble diagrams to illustrate ‘clouds’ of IT power, little did they know their doodles would one day run the world.
Because we run cloud in such a virtualized and abstracted space, the quest for system observability and monitoring is always on.
Working to provide enterprises with channels to open up observability goals is VictoriaMetrics, an open source time-series data monitoring player. The company’s latest logging solution VictoriaLogs is said to be a scalable means for businesses to gain a current monitoring view into their applications and view a more strategic ‘state of all systems’ for enterprise-wide observability.
According to Roman Khavronenko, co-founder of VictoriaMetrics, many logging solutions offer IT professionals a ‘limited window’ into live operations of databases and clusters. But, he says, as operations scale up globally and complexity rises, earlier generations of monitoring solutions cannot offer a granular and simplified view needed to observe accurately how time-series data affects business performance in near real-time.
Past observability paucity
VictoriaLogs is built by engineers with previous experience at Google and Lyft and aims to solve this dearth and paucity in observability, but how? VictoriaLogs works with both structured and unstructured logs for maximum backwards compatibility with the complex large-scale infrastructure needed by users whether they are academic or commercial, working in e-commerce or video gaming teams.
“As engineers, we are all too familiar with frustrations caused by modern logging systems that create further complexity, rather than removing it,” admitted Khavronenko, before moving on in an effort to validate his firm’s approach. “Logs have been around far longer than monitoring and so it is easy to forget just how useful they can be for modern observability. We’ve successfully created a simple and easy-to-use monitoring solution that scales easily and turning to logs was a natural next step. [We give] under-pressure teams enhanced observability of complex systems and their interactions. It is perfect for teams who need to rapidly identify data outliers and anomalies or identify site reliability and availability.”
Designed for ease of installation and simplicity of use, VictoriaLogs is said to speed up the analysis of infrastructure performance and the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) for the complex issues which appear quickly in live time-series environments. VictoriaLogs also promises to improve the observability of systems to help businesses identify and analyze database performance issues, debug them and predict future behavior.
Also well-versed in system analytics at this level is New Relic. The firm describes its technology as an all-in-one observability platform for every engineer. Its recently launched New Relic APM 360 offering is billed as the industry’s next evolution of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) that goes beyond incident troubleshooting.
Essential telemetry data
APM 360 correlates essential telemetry data across an application stack, network and the wider software application development cycle associated with the deployment of all apps and services. This is a cycle that spans deployment changes, key transactions, Service Level Objects (SLOs), logs, infrastructure, errors, security, debugging etc.
New Relic chief product officer Manav Khurana says that now, all engineers, regardless of their role and level of experience, can understand upstream and downstream impacts of issues and discover emerging trends. This in turn means that they can ultimately move from traditional reactive monitoring to regular application maintenance and checks with the right insights to prevent potential issues before they occur.
“New Relic pioneered application monitoring over a decade ago, and we have continuously innovated to meet the growing needs of our customers,” said Khurana. “We introduced our all-in-one observability (O11y) platform, offering a way to get all data across logs, infrastructure and vulnerability management in-context with a single platform pricing. This has laid the foundation for us to redefine the APM landscape once again. New Relic APM 360 represents a pivotal moment in Application Performance Monitoring where we have made it easy for engineers to make APM a simple daily practice.”
The future for observability
Whether we call it observability, or APM, discoverability, plain old monitoring or some new notion all of these technologies (palpable perceptibility perhaps?), we do know that legacy tools in this space will suffer from fragmented data, disparate views of the IT stack and undetected monitoring gaps. Those (and more) are the gaps and shortfalls that vendors are aiming to work against and provide us with a clearer view over.
The IT stack is only getting bigger, more complex and more disparately connected, we need a clear view of the cloud, even on foggy days.
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