Oracle Corp. said today it’s getting into the multicloud observability business with the launch of a new, highly integrated monitoring solution that provides visibility and control for applications deployed across various types of computing infrastructure.

According to Oracle, its new Cloud Observability and Management Platform helps customers reduce the complexity, risk and costs associated with operating a mix of multicloud and on-premises app deployments by providing a single set of management, diagnostic and analytics tools.

Observability in information technology involves monitoring apps by pulling data from logs, metrics, traces and events so that operators can identify the root cause of any issues that crop up and resolve them quickly, and Oracle’s platform is no different. It also provides powerful analytics and machine learning tools to help with remediating any problems, Oracle said.

The company says there’s a big demand for a single, integrated monitoring solution, as enterprises’ information technology environments have rapidly evolved into hybrid cloud and multicloud deployments. Those deployments generally rely on multiple new, cloud-native technologies such as converged databases, software containers, which are used host the components of modern apps, and Kubernetes, which is open-source software that’s used to manage containerized apps.

Providing visibility for all of these new tools is a big problem. Oracle cited data from Gartner Inc. that says about a third of all enterprises use more than 30 kinds of monitoring systems to keep everything in check.

“Things have gotten more complicated as the technologies we observe and monitor are getting more complicated,” Dan Koloski, vice president of product management for Oracle, told SiliconANGLE. “Most of the [existing] tools look at only small portions of the puzzle. People are stuck looking across multiple toolsets, dealing with siloes of data. There are separate on-premises and cloud operations, and each cloud vendor has its own monitoring solution.”

Koloski said the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform is an effort to make up for those deficits, and it’s built to Cloud Native Computing Foundation standards, based on three design principles. First, it aims to be a more complete platform than pure-play monitoring solutions, he said. Second, it’s designed to be more open, and third, it aims to provide higher value for enterprises.

“It’s a single set of visibility across the whole stack, from end user to disk,” Koloski said. “Log metric and trace tools are all unified, so there’s a single set of telemetry. It covers hybrid, on-premises and multicloud. This is not just about observability and monitoring for Oracle.”

The Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform provides a wide array of services to help enterprises keep tabs on their cloud and on-premises infrastructure, including but not limited to logging, logging analytics, database management, application performance monitoring, operations insights, service connector hub, notifications, events, functions, streaming and OS management.

“These are all organic developments from Oracle,” Koloski said. “It’s built natively into Oracle Cloud Gen 2 infrastructure. We understand what it means to build a full stack.

Not least, the new platform is interoperable with third-party tools too, so it can integrate out-of-the-box with popular services such as Slack, Twilio, PagerDuty and Grafana, to name just a few. It works by aggregating data from these services and other apps for holistic analysis, using machine learning algorithms to identify any anomalous system behavior, isolate anything that’s causing a problem, and then remediate it. Oracle says the platform can also prevent outages in many cases, simply though its ability to accurately forecast issues before they crop up.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said Oracle is delivering an industry first with its new platform.

“This end-to-end approach for on-premises and multicloud management not only clearly benefits customers, but also provides an open platform for partners to plug in their offerings,” he said. “The integrations with Grafana, PagerDuty and Slack, and support for standards from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation such as CloudEvents and OpenTracing, demonstrate Oracle’s commitment to interoperability.”

The company said the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform is available now to all customers using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. The service is also available through Oracle’s system integrator partners such as Wipro Ltd., Capgemini SE and Mythics Inc.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: hpgruesen/Pixabay