DEVOPSdigest

Weaveworks announced advanced monitoring and alerting for any Docker deployed application using the Weave Cloud service.

This enables a full stack operations solution for any Docker environment, including Docker CE, Docker EE, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS and DCOS apps.

For Docker customers, this is available in the Docker Store today. Developers can immediately scale their operations to meet the demands of cloud native applications.

Available in both Weave Cloud and Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition, new features are:

- Alerting and monitoring with tens of thousands of fine grained metrics across containers, services, networks, orchestrators and applications, with GUI support for incident capture, history and analysis

- Zero config setup, resilient aggregation and storage for Docker CE and EE deployed applications

- A single operational backplane for apps across Docker, Docker EE, Kubernetes, ECS and DCOS

The new alerting capability can notify developers of performance problems in their applications using metrics from all layers of the stack. A range of integrations with services such as Slack mean Weave Cloud is easily integrated into existing enterprise operations workflows and dashboards.

As with all Weave Cloud, the core is open source. Prometheus co-project lead Julius Volz said, “I’m excited to see Weaveworks contributing to the development of Prometheus’ Docker Swarm integration. This is a very important area to get right for cloud-native monitoring.”

Weave Cloud is designed from the ground up for the unique demands of cloud native application workloads. It includes a horizontally scalable, hosted monitoring service, based on Prometheus, which provides visibility into the health and performance of the environment.

Data is stored as a time-series so that it can be queried using a flexible query language. Weave Cloud provides a sophisticated UI for quick access to the underlying metrics. Data is retained for 13 months allowing users to step back through time to diagnose and analyze long-term trends. It includes the ability to visualize data and integrates with external services for dashboards.

New innovations in Weave Cloud allow for automatic service discovery and monitoring of Docker container services and networks. A daemon monitors the creation of Docker services and networks dynamically enabling monitoring immediately. This is achieved through hot-reloading the monitoring service. No manual configuration is required ensuring that any new service or network is instantly enabled for monitoring.

This latest release of Weave Cloud adds automated alerting, that can notify of changes in the health of a service or a performance problem. This is achieved through Weave Cloud’s ability to aggregate metrics across a cluster and from all layers of the stack in a dynamic environment. Based on Prometheus, Weave Cloud provides a sophisticated rules based system for routing alerts to different teams or services making it easy to integrate into existing workflows and dashboards (Grafana, Datadog, etc).

New features are:

- Alerts for metrics that matter: use both individual and aggregate metrics to build up deep insight

- Alerts on metrics across the whole stack: gather metrics across all levels of the network, container, host and service so that a complete picture is available

- Alerts based on threshold rules: only important important alerts from sustained problems are sent, avoiding ‘alert burnout’

- Route alerts to the right team: group and route notifications to teams using sophisticated rules such as time of day or service tags

- Integrate with enterprise workflows: send notifications via email or integrations like PagerDuty or Slack

Weave Cloud is an ops platform for application developers that removes obstacles to production so teams can easily deploy, manage and monitor microservices and container-based applications. Provided as a managed cloud service for teams and enterprises, it lets developers focus on innovating faster by automating managing applications in production.

Key capabilities are:

- Release management: deploy applications automatically by policy, delivering the latest features to production quickly.

- Visualization: Observe and understand how applications and microservices are connected together in containers, making complex troubleshooting and optimization simple.

- Management: Manage individual containers and services within the cluster, simplifying the handling of complex services and containers.

- Monitoring: Inspect all aspects of the application and cluster, along with alerts and dashboards, providing insightful metrics for managing application performance.

- Networking: Connect containers together in a secure virtual network, simplifying connecting and scaling complex container clusters.

All Weave Cloud tiers and onboarding services are currently available.