New Relic this week announced a new capability in its Intelligent Observability Platform that the company says will enable engineering teams to deploy an eBPF-powered agent to automatically discover and monitor all applications running on Kubernetes clusters.
The New Relic extended Application Performance Monitoring (eAPM) agent is an integration of the extended Berkely Packet Filter (eBPF) technology into New Relic’s platform. For reference, eBPF is a kernel technology that lets developers run programs directly with the Linux kernel without modifying the kernel source code or adding modules, which enables safe tracing and monitoring of system events. The eAPM agent is installed on each node of the Kubernetes cluster, and it then detects all the services running on the Kubernetes cluster. It collects the kernel’s necessary data and sends it to the New Relic platform.
“Our goal is, step one, to let people see what’s in there so they can learn more and understand the applications that they are running. They can understand which applications are using up the memory in the the CPU,” says Nic Benders, chief technical strategist at New Relic.
For customers, New Relic explains that the benefits of eAPM include:
- Faster troubleshooting: Debug more quickly because they can monitor metrics, transaction details, and database performance in one place.
- Speedy deployment without altering existing code: Enable quick setup of application performance monitoring, discover all applications and services, identify critical span issues, and minimize overhead.
- Reduced complexity in monitoring setup: Eliminate manual configurations or dependencies to streamline the monitoring process.
- Cost efficiencies: Remove unnecessary tooling complexity and reduce operational overhead.
Benders explains that eAPM will simplify monitoring because platform teams can deploy observability across entire clusters with one action and without having to contact individual development teams. The agent will work across hundreds of applications and Kubernetes clusters, he says, to provide process-level visibility and identify unusual system behaviors or sudden changes in application performance. The agent will help customers better understand their software’s real-world performance and interactions, which is critical as Kubernetes becomes more popular among enterprise organizations.
“With the value Kubernetes brings to IT and developer teams, there is also increased complexity in workload monitoring,” IDC Group Vice President Stephen Elliot said in a statement. “As the adoption of Kubernetes continues robust growth, observability platforms that automate the monitoring process and bring much-needed visibility to enterprises will be sought after. Customers have a need for this transparency as it will play a key role in enabling enterprises to truly unlock measurable business value from Kubernetes.”
Customers can sign up to access eAPM as part of the New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform, which is available to enterprises worldwide.
Source:: Network World