In high-pressured developer operations environments, corporate developers are like magicians performing a multiple-plate spinning trick. As they spin up containers, they demand full visibility into operations at all times and need to know quickly when a “plate” starts to wobble.

This is why Wavefront, a real-time monitoring and streaming analytics platform acquired last year by VMware Inc., has just introduced a new Distributed Tracing product to bring an enterprise-level combined view for microservices observability.

“If you’re in a DevOps team and you’re spinning up containers, you can’t go blind for even 10 seconds,” said Clement Pang (pictured), chief architect and co-founder of Wavefront by VMware Inc. “We’re the only platform that marries metrics, histograms and distributed tracing in a single platform offering.”

Pang spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed key features of the Distributed Tracing offering and a new tool for automating anomaly detection. (* Disclosure below.)

Tracking microservices health

Key functions for Wavefront’s new Distributed Tracing offering include cloud-scale tracing, built to handle millions of metrics and histograms per second, and built-in support for popular frameworks and languages to quickly evaluate the health of microservices.

In the DevOps world, scale and speed matter. “Scalability is a big piece, you have to be able to take in enormous amounts of data,” Pang explained. “Our latency from ingestion to materialization on a chart is under a second.”

Wavefront also introduced AI Genie last week, which automates anomaly detection and parameter forecasting in cloud platforms. The new tool is designed for both novice and experienced users, providing one-click creation of intelligent alerts and optimization of app performance based on predictive models.

“We’ve really doubled down at looking at artificial intelligence and machine learning in our system,” Pang said. “We understand incidents; we understand anomalies. The holy grail for VMware is to have a self-driving data center.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE