Source: sdxcentral.com
Oracle launched an observability and management platform that can conduct those deeds across virtually any infrastructure construct and tackle what has been an ongoing challenge for organizations in attempting to see what is exactly happening within their dispersed workloads.
The new Cloud Observability and Management Platform is available through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It allows users to monitor cloud-native and traditional software deployments across their multi-cloud infrastructure down to their on-premises locations.
Clay Magouyrk, EVP for cloud infrastructure engineering at Oracle, explained in a blog post that the platform begins by using a logging tool to scrape all of the necessary information into a single repository. That logging tool uses the open source Fluentd collector to pool the data in a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) CloudEvents-compatible format for easier parsing and view of that data.
Users can also set their own rules for acting on that data, including using Oracle’s Streaming service to send logs to any destination. The Oracle logging tool also uses machine learning to detect any issues and provides possible fixes to those problems in real time.
Magouyrk said that the platform’s ability to log data from across different environments is what sets it apart from competing offers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudWatch and Microsoft Azure Monitor.
The platform’s monitoring component provides what Magouyrk described as “real and synthetic end-user monitoring, server monitoring, and distributed tracing, compatible with the open source OpenTracing and OpenMetrics frameworks.” This allows a user to monitor down to the end-user experience for each interaction, which is common in a microservices-based environment.
Workload Spread
This ability to observe workloads across different environments is becoming more important for organizations that want to operate in a multi-cloud environment. Those moves are becoming even more dispersed as those distributed workloads also begin operating in smaller subsets of those clouds like virtual machines (VMs), containers, and serverless.
“The problem with all this is that IT is an increasingly hybrid, distributed-but-integrated, and complex endeavor, both on and off premises; with burgeoning scale, applications, data, devices … and vendors,” wrote Mark Peters, senior analyst at ESG in a blog post. “Modern applications frustrate most legacy monitoring solutions as they are ephemeral, with services being spun up and down in mere seconds, which makes it difficult for solutions that capture data at every 15, 5, or even 1-minute intervals.”
Peters added that the Oracle platform is a “pretty sexy answer to this long-term vexing issue. It gives organizations a level of ‘arms wrapped around everything’ control, based upon its single source of truth and comprehensive visibility.”
Outside of Oracle’s claimed performance advantage over cloud rivals AWS and Microsoft, a number of other vendors offer similar multi-cloud management tools. VMware, for instance, offers its CloudHealth product that it gained from acquiring CloudHealth in 2018.
