DevOps security startup Sysdig Inc. announced a raft of updates to its cloud monitoring platform today, saying they will help increase adoption of the open-source Prometheus tool that’s used to monitor and provide alerts for Kubernetes container environments.

As Sysdig explains, Prometheus has emerged as an enterprise standard in monitoring Kubernetes, which is open-source software used to orchestrate containers that host the components of modern applications that run on any infrastructure. Prometheus is popular because it provides a wide range of capabilities and helps companies avoid being locked-in to any public cloud platform provider.

But using Prometheus brings its own set of headaches. One of the problems is that as an organization scales up its use of Kubernetes, and therefore Prometheus, they can quickly become overwhelmed by the need to manage the related infrastructure, dashboards, exporters and alerts they receive.

Another issue is that users sometimes struggle with the long term storage of time series and information silos. They also lack a global view of the health of their environment across all of their applications and infrastructure.

In addition, learning PromQL, which is the query language for Prometheus, is a time-consuming task. But knowledge of PromQL is necessary to analyze properly the various metrics Prometheus generates.

So these are the issues Sysdig is promising to resolve with today’s update to Sysdig Monitor. First up is a new Integrations Manager that enables automatic discovery and assisted deployment of Prometheus integrations together with preconfigured dashboards, alerts and a new user interface. By automating discovery and configuration management, it should save teams hundreds of hours, the company said.

To solve the challenges of PromQL, Sysdig Monitor is adding a new PromQL Explorer tool that makes it simpler to learn and use the language. It enables users to quickly craft queries even without knowledge of the language, add them to dashboards and alerts and rapidly zero in on important metrics. Added to that, Sysdig Monitor now enables automatic labels to be added to PromQL queries, reducing complexity by up to 90% in most cases.

Customers can now use PromQL or a form-based user interface to inspect all their metrics no matter what the data source is, Sysdig said. That provides universal access for a range of users with varying experience, from developers to architects.

On the storage side, Sysdig Monitor adds support for Prometheus remote_write, which means metrics can be offloaded to Sysdig itself for long-term storage.

Sysdig Vice President of Engineering and Technology Saravanan Subbiah said users need complete visibility into their infrastructure, services and applications across all environments if they’re to make the most of Prometheus.

“As organizations move from proprietary monitoring approaches to DIY open source, the resource requirements can spiral out of control,” he said. “SREs and developers need an easy-to-use Prometheus monitoring service that is radically simple to integrate into DevOps workflows without breaking open source standards.”

The new capabilities are available in both Sysdig Monitor and IBM Cloud Monitoring, which is built on Sysdig Monitor, starting today.

Image: Sysdig