UPDATED 11:00 EDT / MARCH 24 2020

INFRA

Sysdig integrates with Prometheus for better container monitoring

Container security startup Sysdig Inc. said today it’s integrating its platform with the popular open-source monitoring tool Prometheus.

The idea is to help address some of the challenges around scale, data retention and enterprise access controls that are preventing some companies from fully adopting Prometheus. Sysdig sells tools that help companies to secure container environments, which are used to host modern software applications that can run on any computing platform.

Its main product is a “cloud native intelligence platform” that helps to manage large deployments of containers. It does so by listing the different network connections to each instance within a cluster, displaying the traffic each one handles and the bandwidth being used.

As for Prometheus, it’s an open-source tool that provides additional container monitoring capabilities by collecting metrics at specific intervals, comparing and evaluating that data against established rules, and then triggering an alarm should something go awry. It monitors both the status of both the container and the internal metrics of the application running inside, and any requests that flow through them. It also has its own query language that can be used to dig into those metrics for additional insights.

Sysdig says Prometheus’ capabilities complement its own tools nicely, but worries that some users are encountering problems that prevent them from adopting the open-source tool more widely, including both scaling and workflow issues. In addition, Prometheus can benefit from a more unified view across clusters to reduce risk and maintain application availability.

“Prometheus is an open-source, standardized way to collect metrics for infrastructure, applications and services in the cloud world,” Payal Chakravarty, Sysdig’s vice president of product management, told SiliconANGLE. “Developers love getting started with Prometheus to get instant results. However, while this may work for a small set of applications and infrastructure, once a company surpasses a handful of apps, it’s no longer feasible.”

The challenge of running Prometheus at large scale is a big hurdle that many enterprises have been unable to overcome, Sysdig said. For example, most companies use the open-source Kubernetes software to orchestrate their container clusters, but that significantly increases the number of objects and labels they need to track. In addition, each Prometheus server needs to be monitored individually, and that makes it difficult to find trends that would be spotted quickly from a more unified view.

“Running Prometheus across an enterprise can result in managing and federating data across tens or hundreds of Prometheus servers and having to figure out enterprise workflows, such as single-sign-on, role based access control, team, adhering to SLAs or compliance,” Chakravarty said. “As applications grow, it becomes a huge manageability and reliability issue to operate a highly available monitoring solution without disrupting developer work.”

Chakravarty said one of Sysdig’s biggest customers is IBM Corp., which ran into the same kind of scaling problems with its own Prometheus servers. But the company overcame those problems after partnering with Sysdig to deliver its IBM Cloud monitoring service.

“The full Prometheus compatibility is valuable for enterprises that have standardized on Prometheus,” Chakravarty said. “Sysdig does not force developers to move away from Prometheus, a tool they love, once it doesn’t scale to their needs. With full compatibility with Sysdig, enterprises can scale without sacrificing the investments they have made in building dashboards, alerts, integrations, et cetera. If a company moves to a monitoring solution that is not fully compatible, those integrations are no longer usable.”

The integration with Sysdig’s Secure DevOps Platform enables enterprises to benefit from a scalable system that can handle up to 100 million metrics per second. It can also retain data for up to 13 months, giving DevOps teams access to long-term analysis that can be used to make better capacity planning and resource usage decisions.

Image: Sysdig

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