The new cloud-computing environments may be lighter and less clunky than older information technology systems. But they’re not necessarily less complex. They’re made of many compounded services and abstraction layers. They require a new set of binoculars to monitor the busy, ephemeral goings-on inside them.

The key is to shift from monitoring devices or nodes to monitoring services, according to Dave Link (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of ScienceLogic Inc. The service level is where the action is in cloud — and where teams can catch, predict and prevent problems, Link pointed out. It features short-lived systems and services, containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications) and abstractions.

“All these abstraction layers require a different mindset,” Link stated.

Link spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the ScienceLogic Symposium in Washington, D.C. They discussed the need to monitor modern IT systems at the service level (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Linking DevOps chain

Everything going on at the service level has to be visible so operations teams can take easy action on it.

“Enterprises are getting into a moment where they’re having to really act as service bureaus, service brokers,” Link said. “And that means that all the different teams that support different technology silos really have to work together as one — yet they still need their own views.” This requires a platform with an open architecture for pulling in and contextualizing data from numerous sources.

Beyond monitoring at the service level, modern IT needs a system that links silos together, Link explained. Developer operations does not work with either monolithic monitoring or siloed monitoring alone — it requires both, he added.

Most products built for monitoring offer a single-tenant enterprise view of a system, according to Link, and that doesn’t offer the granularity for each persona to get a deep view into their own silos. They need to work as a converged team, working as one across many silos. 

“That requires a very different way of thinking, a different tool space, a different solution to the problem that we built kind of from the ground up,” he stated. 

ScienceLogic offers both kinds of views in a holistic platform. “It’s now really appropriate for the DevOps teams, the teams that are really having to break down the silos and work as one team,” Link concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the ScienceLogic Symposium. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the ScienceLogic Symposium event. Neither ScienceLogic Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE