Sumo Logic Inc. joined the list of companies making announcements at the DockerCon conference today with the introduction of new monitoring features for software container environments.

Software containers, the theme of DockerCon, are an increasingly popular means of deploying enterprise applications. The technology provides the ability to bundle code into lightweight, portable packages that lend themselves well to fast-paced development projects and allow applications to run unchanged on different computers and operating systems.

But containers also have their drawbacks. Containerized applications are often made up of numerous different modules that can be challenging to monitor, which is what Sumo Logic’s update addresses. It extends the existing container support provided by the company’s infrastructure analytics platform with three new capabilities.

The first enhancement is designed to let administrators uncover important operational information faster. According to Sumo Logic, the feature can automatically extract key metrics from the large amounts of system logs generated by a container environment. This cuts the amount of data that the platform has to analyze when an administrator runs a query, which Sumo Logic said enables up to 100 times better performance.

The two other features that debuted today focus on Kubernetes. Originally developed by Google Inc., the open-source framework is the go-to tool for orchestrating large-scale container environments.

Thanks to the update, Sumo Logic’s platform is now capable of monitoring applications that run on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s managed Kubernetes service. The software can also collect more operational data about a deployment. Sumo Logic has added the ability to gather performance metrics and related metadata via Prometheus, an open-source monitoring system used in many Kubernetes environments.

Rounding out the update is a new data management feature designed to help companies better manage all this information. According to Sumo Logic, its platform now provides the ability to convert metrics from the highly technical Graphite format into a more flexible form that may be organized using custom tags. Grouping metrics by label should theoretically make it easier for administrators to locate and analyze important items.

Image: Sumo Logic