Sysdig Adds Kubernetes Cost Monitoring Tool to Portfolio

Sysdig today adds a Cost Advisor module for Kubernetes clusters to its portfolio of tools for managing and securing container environments.

Aaron Newcomb, director of product marketing for Sysdig, says as an extension of the existing Sysdig Monitor service, the Cost Advisor module eliminates the need for IT teams to deploy a separate platform to track Kubernetes costs.

While Kubernetes itself enables IT teams to reduce costs by more efficiently scaling infrastructure resources, there is a tendency to overprovision the platform itself. In the interest of availability and reliability, many developers will allocate as many compute resources as possible to a cluster regardless of the actual utilization rate. In fact, a recent survey conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in collaboration with the FinOps Foundation finds more than two-thirds of respondents (68%) reporting their Kubernetes costs are rising.

An almost equal percentage (69%) also noted that they either have no cost monitoring or, at best, only have cost estimates for the Kubernetes clusters they deploy.

Newcomb says the Cost Advisor module eliminates guesswork by leveraging Sysdig’s monitoring service to track Kubernetes costs in real-time. IT teams can save hundreds of thousands of dollars by reducing the amount of wasted IT infrastructure resources by 40% on average, he adds. Armed with those insights, it then becomes simpler for IT teams to consider which Kubernetes clusters they might want to consolidate, Newcomb notes.

In addition, ongoing visibility into Kubernetes costs will also encourage application development and deployment teams to consume existing resources more efficiently, notes Newcomb.

Following the downturn in the global economy, there is obviously more pressure than ever to control IT costs. Many organizations have also embraced financial operations (FinOps) best practices to encourage their DevOps teams to reduce the total cost of cloud computing. The primary issue organizations encounter in reining in cloud costs is a lack of visibility into those environments.

Many enterprise IT organizations also want to be able to continuously monitor pricing offered by multiple cloud service providers as they decide where to deploy their next cloud-native workload. As the percentage of workloads running on Kubernetes clusters steadily increases, it’s also become more likely that centralized IT teams will assume responsibility for managing those clusters. Finance teams that are embracing FinOps best practices in the cloud era will then pressure those centralized IT teams to, at the very least, make sure Kubernetes costs become more predictable.

FinOps is not necessarily a new idea; finance teams have been pressuring IT teams to rein in costs ever since the first data center was constructed. However, as IT environments have become more dynamic, achieving that goal has become more challenging in an era where the total monthly cost of IT remains unknown until the bill arrives at the end of the month. The most important thing is simply to eliminate any unwanted surprises at a time when financial resources are much more limited.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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