DEVOPSdigest

Sysdig announced significant enhancements to Sysdig Monitor, which radically simplifies Prometheus adoption with a new integrations manager, simplified querying, and long-term metric storage for its managed Prometheus service.

Prometheus is fast becoming the tool of choice to monitor Kubernetes-based workloads as organizations build modern cloud applications. Developers and SREs rely on Prometheus as an open standard for monitoring that provides broad capabilities and helps avoid vendor lock-in. However, as Prometheus environments proliferate throughout an organization, managing the infrastructure, exporters, dashboards, and alerts becomes complex and time consuming. In addition, organizations struggle with long-term storage of time series, information silos, and lack of a global view of the health of their environment across all applications and infrastructure. Learning PromQL (the query language of Prometheus) and how to use it effectively can take months, reducing the ability of teams to properly analyze their metrics.

Sysdig is solving these problems with new enhancements to its managed Prometheus service. Organizations can now break free from the burden of setting up and managing monitoring tools and instead focus scarce engineering resources on innovation. In addition, developer and DevOps teams that need deep visibility into cloud-native applications save time with an easy way to understand performance and health with a single view across services, clusters, and clouds.

First-Of-Its-Kind Integrations Manager: Sysdig Monitor now provides automatic discovery and assisted deployment of Prometheus monitoring integrations along with preconfigured dashboards, alerts, and a new integrations management interface. Sysdig is the first company to build integration management functionality based on open source Prometheus exporters, displacing proprietary integrations and app checks. By automating integration discovery and configuration management, customers can save hundreds of hours of effort while maintaining an open approach for the integrations they deploy.

PromQL Explorer for Querying: Sysdig is simplifying the way teams interact with metrics to speed mean time to discover (MTTD). Sysdig makes it easier to both learn and use PromQL by introducing the PromQL Explorer for users to quickly craft queries, zero in on what’s important, then instantly add those queries to dashboards and alerts. In addition, the new PromQL Library helps to discover popular queries from the monitoring community to learn new ways to get to the information that really matters.

Simplified Labeling: Sysdig is also introducing the ability to add automatic labels at the time of ingestion to help customers reduce the complexity of their PromQL queries by up to 90%. Customers can now use PromQL or a form-based UI to inspect all their metrics no matter the data source. This provides universal access for a range of users, from developers to architects, with different experience levels.

Long Term Storage For Existing Prometheus Deployments: Lastly, Sysdig is adding support for Prometheus remote_write so organizations can offload Prometheus metrics to Sysdig for long term storage. Users can push custom metrics into the Sysdig backend for visibility without installing an agent. The number of custom metrics can now be increased dynamically with flexible billing options, allowing organizations to accommodate unplanned custom metrics growth without surprise bills.

Native Prometheus Compatibility: Unlike other vendors, Sysdig Monitor is natively compatible with Prometheus. Customers can enjoy the best of both worlds by maintaining their existing investment in Prometheus while gaining the simplicity and enterprise support that Sysdig adds to the equation. At the same time, customers will be able to free up valuable people-resources to concentrate on business critical applications instead of mundane monitoring infrastructure.

“Meeting user expectations for availability and performance requires complete visibility into infrastructure, services, and applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” said Saravanan Subbiah, VP of Engineering and Technology at Sysdig. “As organizations move from proprietary monitoring approaches to DIY open source, the resource requirements can spiral out of control. SREs and developers need an easy-to-use Prometheus monitoring service that is radically simple to integrate into DevOps workflows without breaking open source standards.”

In addition to the Sysdig SaaS solution, the new Prometheus capabilities are now available in IBM Cloud Monitoring, IBM’s cloud-native, container-intelligence management system built on Sysdig Monitor.