Sumo Logic Inc. today debuted updates to its observability platform that bring new features for detecting issues in information technology infrastructure, including Amazon Web Services and Kubernetes environments.

Publicly traded Sumo Logic provides a cloud-based platform that enterprises use to spot IT malfunctions such as application errors. The company has more than 2,100 clients worldwide, including Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Whole Foods and other big names.

The flagship addition in today’s update is a set of new monitoring dashboards for administrators. Sumo Logic calls them Service Maps and Service Dashboards.

With Service Maps, Sumo Logic’s platform creates a visualization of the different microservices that make up a software container application. It displays a link between two microservices when one depends on the other to work. Administrators can click on a component, such as a database, to see if it’s experiencing any technical issues. 

Service Maps are meant to make it easier to find the root cause of application malfunctions when it’s unclear exactly which of a workload’s components has encountered problems. After spotting the malfunctioning component, administrators can use Service Dashboards, another new addition announced today, to take a closer look. Service Dashboards provide more in-depth information such as information about components’ historical performance fluctuations.

“When an application issue arises engineers must be able to understand the full failure chain that led to the alert at the drop of a hat, otherwise restoring the reliability of the application will take too long and the failure will likely recur,” said Bruno Kurtic, Sumo Logic’s founding vice president of strategy and solutions. 

Also new in the release: improved Kubernetes and AWS support. For Kubernetes environments, Sumo Logic now provides the ability to use its Root Cause Explorer tool to find anomalies in metrics. Metrics are a type of operational information that encompasses data points such as a server’s processor and storage usage. Sumo Logic’s platform can also provide pointers on how much memory and processor capacity Kubernetes administrators should provision to meet application demands. 

 AWS customers, in turn, can start using Sumo Logic’s platform to monitor the health of code running on the AWS Lambda service. AWS Lambda is the cloud giant’s serverless computing offering.

As part of their infrastructure monitoring responsibilities, IT departments keep an eye on the health of not only back-office workloads such as Kubernetes clusters but also the front-end applications with which the company’s customers interact. That’s a use case Sumo Logic is moving to address more directly with a new feature it calls Browser Real User Monitoring. As the name implies, it allows administrators to track key user experience metrics in real time as customers interact with an application to find areas for improvement.

Today’s updates come a few months after Sumo Logic introduced new monitoring feature bundles geared specifically towards AWS and Kubernetes environments. At the time, Chief Executive Officer Ramin Sayar (pictured) summed up the company’s approach to troubleshooting IT malfunctions by saying it aims to help clients “quickly know the what, where, why and how of these issues in real time.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE