Logz.io Inc. today debuted a new application performance monitoring tool, App 360, that promises to ease the task of fixing technical issues in containerized workloads.

Boston- and Tel Aviv-based Logz.io is an observability software startup backed by more than $120 million in funding. The company’s customer base includes Siemens AG, Dish Network Corp. and thousands of other organizations. Logz.io’s flagship observability platform, Open 360, uses artificial intelligence to help companies troubleshoot malfunctioning components of their technology infrastructure.

The new App 360 tool that the software maker debuted today is available as part of Open 360. It’s designed to ease the task of troubleshooting container applications based on the microservices architecture, which is widely used in the enterprise. A microservices-based application is implemented as a collection of software modules that each run in a separate container.

A containerized service can comprise dozens of modules or more that all generate diagnostics data. Because of the data’s volume and complexity, administrators often don’t analyze it manually when troubleshooting performance issues. Instead, they visualize the information in dashboards that automatically highlight items of interest.

According to Logz.io, creating dashboards to track application performance is usually a time-consuming process. Administrators have to determine what subset of an application’s diagnostics data should be collected, filter the rest and make ongoing adjustments as needed. The task can require hours of work in some cases. 

App 360 promises to streamline the process. According to the company, it provides prepackaged dashboards that don’t require extensive manual configuration to set up. They track performance metrics such as the number of user requests a workload processes per minute, the latency with whose requests are completed and the frequency of processing failures. 

“App 360 takes everything that’s wrong with traditional APM and flips it on its head,” said Logz.io co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Asaf Yigal. “Whereas traditional APM is heavy, hard to implement, expensive, shackled by vendor lock-in and slow to bring business value, App 360 is exactly the opposite.”

App 360 collects application telemetry using a monitoring program, or agent, based on the open-source OpenTelemetry data collection tool. Gathering diagnostics data from an application usually requires modifying it with custom code, which is a time-consuming task. In contrast, Logz.io claims its OpenTelemetry agent can be set up in a few minutes. 

The agent collects three types of data about applications: logs, metrics and traces. A log is a file that describes a specific event, such as an application outage, while metrics track latency fluctuations and other trends that unfold over time. Traces, in turn, are another type of diagnostics file that can provide insight into which specific component of an application is causing a technical issue.

In complex container applications, it’s not always apparent which software component generated what piece of diagnostics data. Log.io says App 360 automatically associates each metric, trace and log with the application component that produced it. The tool then visualizes this information in a map that highlights when a software module malfunctions and provides access to the technical data Logz.io’s platform collected about the incident.

App 360 is generally available today. 

Image: Logz.io