Observability providers Observe and New Relic this week separately introduced Kubernetes-specific capabilities in their platforms that will enable faster problem resolution across complex container environments.
For its part, Observe unveiled additional capabilities to its observability platform to help DevOps teams, site reliability engineers, and software engineers to more quickly identify and resolve issues in distributed Kubernetes stacks.
Kubernetes Explorer will simplify visualizing and troubleshooting containerized applications in Kubernetes environments, according to Observe, which will help IT teams by unifying fragmented data across metrics, traces, and logs—now with expert insights into the Kubernetes platform. Kubernetes adoption is growing, and that is increasing the complexity of observing multiple distributed applications and the supporting infrastructure, Observe says.
“Dynamic and distributed containerized deployments create a massive amount of fragmented data across metrics, traces, and logs. While traditional solutions cannot handle the high volume of fast-moving data, even the current generation of observability solutions struggles to provide contextual insights across data formats, application deployments, the Kubernetes platform, and cloud-native infrastructure,” writes Amit Sharma, vice president of product marketing at Observe, in a blog announcing the news.
According to Gartner’s 2024 Critical Capabilities for Container Management report “by 2027, more than 75% of all AI deployments with use container technology as the underlying compute environment, up from less than 50% today.” With environments growing more complex and sophisticated, IT teams will need more specific expertise to quickly solve issues around critical applications, industry watchers say.
“The complexity of Cloud Native infrastructures remains a key challenge for SREs and on-call engineers,” said James Governor, analyst and co-founder at RedMonk, said in a statement. “Observe is addressing this issue with Kubernetes-specific tooling, augmented with new AI capabilities designed to automate visualization and discovery, identify anomalies and simplify troubleshooting”
Kubernetes Explorer integrates with Observe’s AI Investigator to speed root-cause analysis and problem resolution by analyzing every component of a distributed platform, including the Kubernetes platform. It builds custom, incident-specific visualizations and offers suggestions to IT teams to accelerate troubleshooting and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR). Kubernetes Explorer can also provide visibility into the historical state of Kubernetes components, enabling IT professionals to better understand performance issues and resolve them. The add-on provides an overview of the entire Kubernetes environment and allows users to dig into data on specific clusters, namespaces, nodes, pods, containers, and deployed workloads, the company says.
Observe is a SaaS platform, and customers deploy Observe agents to collect telemetry data. The agents can collect data from a variety of sources, including infrastructure such as Kubernetes, databases such as MongoDB or Snowflake, and other applications. The agents collect time-series data, logs, traces/spans, and performance data from these various sources and send the data to Observe’s platform. Observe then takes the raw telemetry data and curates, normalizes, and structures it to make it more easily navigable and usable for troubleshooting by customer teams.
Customers access the Observe platform with a web-based user interface, which provides observability and troubleshooting tools and capabilities. Primarily Observe is used by DevOps teams, site reliability engineers, and engineering teams. Kubernetes Explorer is available to all Observe customers at no additional cost.
New Relic targets Kubernetes workloads
Separately, New Relic announced “one-step observability for Kubernetes” that will provide developers with monitoring capabilities for dynamic Kubernetes environments to accelerate up incident resolution and improve developer productivity. With this release, New Relic provides complete visibility across applications and Kubernetes workloads, enabling teams to quickly identify and resolve issues, according to the company.
“Modern organizations are embracing Kubernetes to drive innovation and efficiency gains, but this often comes with trade-offs in performance management,” said Manav Khurana, New Relic chief product officer, in a statement. “New Relic simplifies observability workloads for Kubernetes environments so that developer and platform teams can more easily monitor their stacks—all with intelligent insights driven by our AI-strengthened Intelligent Observability platform.”
Monitoring the performance of applications deployed on Kubernetes components introduces unique challenges, New Relic says, requiring developer and platform teams to install application performance monitoring (APM) and Kubernetes integrations separately to achieve observability, which can be a time-consuming and cumbersome process. New Relic now automatically instruments APM with Kubernetes and also provides AI insights into the environment.
Among the new features specific to Kubernetes in the New Relic observability platform are:
- One-step instrumentation: Automates APM instrumentation alongside Kubernetes deployments, which automatically upgrades APM agents so teams can accurately manage the performance of their Kubernetes clusters with the applications—without the need for code changes.
- AI-strengthened out-of-the-box insights: Correlates application and Kubernetes data on a unified interface thanks to pre-configured Kubernetes UI and alerts. The troubleshooting capabilities allows teams to quickly identify and resolve performance issues.
- Native support for OpenTelemetry (OTel) and Prometheus: Unifies OTel-instrumented Kubernetes clusters and Prometheus-instrumented hosts alongside all telemetry data to eliminate fragmentation and blind spots.
- Democratize observability with New Relic AI: Enables users of any role or skill level can easily access insights and take action through natural language prompts, making observability accessible to all.
New Relic one-step observability for Kubernetes is available to all customers.
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Source:: Network World