Amazon Web Services Inc. announced an important new cloud service today to help customers to keep a better eye on the performance of their Kubernetes-managed container software deployments.

The company said Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is generally available starting today, giving customers an easier way to monitor modern applications.

The service is based on the open-source Prometheus system, which is one of the most popular tools for monitoring containers. Developers use containers to host the components of their applications because it means they’re lightweight, agile and can easily be moved among different types of computing infrastructure. Prometheus integrates with Kubernetes, which is software that’s used to orchestrate large numbers of containers.

Although hosting applications in containers has many advantages, it causes a lot of headaches too. For instance, most containers only run for a short amount of time, and they share infrastructure resources with others. There’s also a large volume of operational metrics that makes it difficult to monitor them using traditional application monitoring tools designed to run on bare-metal or virtual servers.

That means companies often struggle to gain insights into the health or performance of their container apps, especially when deployed at scale. If companies lack insight into the performance of their apps, they risk disruption and subpar performance.

Most companies use Prometheus to overcome this challenge. Prometheus is optimized to gather operational metrics from containers and provide alerts for any potential issues. But it brings its own problems when companies try to scale it across multiple servers and it can be a nightmare to configure for high availability. Add to that, it takes a lot of time to optimize how Prometheus uses memory and storage resources to improve response times and keep costs low.

Amazon Managed Service for Promeutheus is meant to relieve those headaches. The most important benefit is that the service is fully managed and serverless, so customers can just fire it up and not have to worry about any of the overheads, such as the infrastructure it runs on, or hassle with trying to optimize its performance.

There’s virtually no learning curve with Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus because it uses the same data model and query language as the open-source Prometheus.

The service scales the resources needed for ingestion, storage and querying of operation metrics automatically as customer’s workloads increase or decrease. Further, it integrates with security services such as AWS Identity and Access Management and AWS CloudTrail so customers can easily control access to, and audit their data.

It also solves the question of how to achieve high availability, with multiple Availability Zone deployments meaning data can be replicated across three Amazon Availability Zones within the same region.

Customers can use Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus as a standalone service to monitor their container deployments. It can also be used with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Amazon Elastic Container Service and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.

AWS Vice President of Monitoring and Observability Nandini Ramani said Amazon’s customers like using Prometheus because it’s purpose-built for monitoring container applications. The only problem is they find themselves spending far too much time trying to run and manage it at scale.

“With Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, customers have access to a scalable, secure, and highly available monitoring service that is optimized for containerized applications running on AWS and on-premises,” Ramani said. “Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus eliminates the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running Prometheus, so customers can focus on building modern applications that help them deliver new, innovative experiences to their end users.”

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE software containers have become hugely popular, used to build the majority of applications today. But that widespread adoption has led to the similarly widespread realization that large deployments of containers are tricky to keep tabs on, he said, hence the popularity of Prometheus.

“Now it turns out Prometheus itself is not as easy to manage as enterprises would like, especially when it’s used at scale, so they’re looking to their cloud platform providers for a solution. They want them to manage not only their container workloads but also manage how they maintain control of those workloads with Prometheus,” Mueller said. “Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus allows developer teams to focus on what matters most, which is their applications as opposed to the plumbing that keeps the up and running.”

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is priced based on the amount of data ingested and stored. The service is available now in Amazon’s US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland) and Europe (Stockholm) regions.

Image: Amazon/Prometheus