Epsagon Extends Kubernetes Monitoring Reach
Epsagon today announced it has extended the scope of its monitoring platform for containers and serverless computing environments in addition to adding support for the Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Previously, the company’s namesake software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform only supported the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
Company CEO Nitzan Shapira says the extensions provide dashboards for monitoring infrastructure in addition to making it possible to create custom dashboards to better understand the health of a specific application environment.
In addition, Epsagon has added auto alerting for metrics such as trace, user-defined and resource utilization on AWS.
IT teams employ Epsagon using a lightweight software development kit (SDK) within their applications to collect telemetry data.
Shapira says organizations deploying microservices-based applications on Kubernetes clusters need access to observability tools that capture relevant metrics from both the applications and the underlying infrastructure on which they depend.
Epsagon captures service performance metrics, service metrics from the cloud infrastructure provider and custom business metrics, says Shapira. Metrics, logs, traces and payloads can all be monitored via a single pane of glass.
IT teams can correlate a trace to relevant logs and metrics via dashboards that make it easy to navigate multiple nodes and pods, he says.
Given the cost of applying monitoring, the use of these tools in monolithic applications was often limited to only the most mission-critical applications. However, given the dependencies that exist in microservices-based IT environments, observability becomes a much more pressing requirement. Epsagon is making the case for employing monitoring tools designed from the ground up for these types of applications that also provide visibility into the underlying infrastructure.
It’s not clear to what degree the management of applications and infrastructure will converge within organizations that deploy Kubernetes clusters. Historically, IT organizations have tended to manage applications and infrastructure separately. In the age of DevOps, those functions have clearly begun to converge. Kubernetes adoption is likely to further accelerate that trend.
IT teams, of course, are especially challenged by the ephemeral nature of microservices based on containers. Developers frequently rip and replace containers with little to no notice. Serverless computing frameworks add more complexity because more IT teams have no visibility into a class of platforms that has become increasingly popular with developers. Applications based on event-driven architectures are taking advantage of serverless computing frameworks to reduce the size of their applications by invoking functions running on a remote platform.
Of course, developers have ready access to open source monitoring tools such as Prometheus. However, Shapira notes many IT teams prefer to access monitoring tools delivered via a SaaS platform they don’t have to manage. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic it’s clear more IT management tools are being deployed in the cloud. Those tools also need to be able to provide visibility into applications and infrastructure because IT organizations are not only more sensitive to cost than ever, but also many of them are now looking to converge the management of applications and infrastructure more aggressively to reduce the total cost of IT.
