Sysdig and IBM announced they have extended their alliance to make Sysdig monitoring tools more broadly available across IBM public cloud services.
IBM first adopted the Sysdig platform to enable DevOps teams to monitor workloads running on a subset of the IBM Cloud in June 2018. Now the company will extend those managed instances of the Sysdig monitoring platform running on its own public cloud to include additional cloud services such as IBM Watson, Event Streams, Cloud Databases, Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Foundry.
Janet Matsuda, chief marketing officer for Sysdig, said monitoring capabilities as especially critical as the number of microservices-based applications running on public clouds continues to increase. IBM also makes use of the open source Prometheus monitoring platform to monitor many of those applications. Sysdig last month announced compatibility with Prometheus as a data source.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s probable that more monolithic applications will also be moving into the cloud as part of organizations’ business continuity strategies. Applications that run in the cloud are easier to manage remotely. Regardless of whether applications are monolithic or based on microservices, it’s clear IT teams will be “flying blind” unless they have access to monitoring tools, Matsuda noted.
Over time, many of the monolithic applications being moved into the cloud will be transformed into a more flexible set of microservices that are easier to update. As that transition occurs, the need to observe the myriad microservices running on a public cloud becomes an even bigger challenge for IT teams.
Of course, some IT teams will prefer to employ their own monitoring tools versus relying on a managed service, especially if they are trying to centralize the management of IT across multiple public clouds and on-premises IT environments. However, for now, at least, the bulk of IT teams are still employing various public clouds in isolation from one another.
Longer-term, the relationship between Prometheus and commercial monitoring platforms is still being defined. Many application developers are relying on Prometheus to observe applications during the development process. Many IT teams, however, are already making extensive use of commercial monitoring platforms to identify and correlate issues in production environments. Sysdig is betting most of those organizations will continue to rely on those tools because they are easier to set up and navigate. In addition, each instance of a Kubernetes cluster currently requires its own instance of Prometheus.
On the plus side, the amount of time and effort being applied to instrumentation and observability as part of any set of best DevOps practices continues to increase sharply. Furthermore, the need to combine security and operational IT metrics and analytics to advance DevSecOps adoption is also going to push IT organizations toward more robust monitoring platforms. Arguably, the real challenge is no longer finding a way to instrument applications as much as it will be turning all the data being collected into actionable intelligence that can be relied on to automate the management of IT at an unprecedented scale.
