Sysdig provides cloud monitoring at scale with full Prometheus compatibility

Sysdig, the secure DevOps leader, announced cloud monitoring at scale with full Prometheus compatibility. Sysdig addresses the issues that hold teams back from the organization-wide adoption of Prometheus monitoring: scale, data retention, and enterprise access controls.

Sysdig also introduces support for creating dashboards, alerts, and metric analytics based on PromQL, the query language for Prometheus. Sysdig is the only enterprise monitoring solution to be fully compatible with Prometheus. This allows customers to retain their investment in existing Prometheus exporters, configurations, alerts, and dashboards.

With Sysdig, DevOps and cloud teams can scale their visibility, security, and troubleshooting capabilities with a supported platform that simplifies management.

In a separate release, the company announced PromCat.io, a free repository of curated Prometheus exporters, dashboards, and alerts to monitor any infrastructure, application, and service running in the cloud. Sysdig offers documentation and suggested configurations for PromCat integrations.

“As enterprises journey to the cloud, our focus is on helping them accelerate application development and deliver new, competitive capabilities. A core challenge in this is reducing the complexity in managing various workloads with technologies all over the world,” said Jason McGee, chief technology officer and vice president, IBM Cloud Platform.

“IBM Cloud is built on open technologies to address this issue and connect various IT and cloud environments. Since Prometheus is the key monitoring tool within many of IBM Cloud’s open projects, Sysdig cloud monitoring with Prometheus compatibility provides development teams with a more holistic view that can help them further simplify operations.”

Organizations are moving to the cloud and DevOps workflows to ship applications faster. However, meeting customer expectations requires complete visibility into infrastructure, services, and applications across multi and hybrid clouds and on-premises data centers.

Developers are rapidly adopting open source Prometheus to monitor the performance of their applications. With more than 13,500 code commits and 6,300 contributors, Prometheus adoption is accelerating. However, as organizations transition to full-scale production, they encounter scaling and workflow issues.

Additional requirements — including the need for centralized and scalable metric stores, a unified view across clusters and services, and out-of-the-box insights — are needed in order to reduce risk and maintain application availability.

Without a macro view of the environment, it is difficult to anticipate issues with microservices that have cross-platform dependencies.

Fully compatible Prometheus monitoring

As organizations scale cloud deployments, they want to retain the industry-standard monitoring approach their developers prefer. Sysdig is the only cloud-scale monitoring solution fully compatible with Prometheus and the PromQL query language.

This enables DevOps teams to retain their investment in existing Prometheus exporters, configurations, alerts, and dashboards. The Sysdig platform enhances its existing capabilities with greater scale, visibility, security, troubleshooting, and support.

Cloud scale

With microservices and Kubernetes, scaling is a major hurdle. With Kubernetes, there is an increase in the number of objects and labels to track. With microservices, there is a dramatic increase in instances to monitor and therefore, the number of metrics to collect.

Additionally, with Prometheus, companies are forced to monitor each Prometheus server on its own, making it difficult to view trends that would be visible from a unified view. Issues on microservices that have cross-platform dependencies may go unnoticed.

The Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform provides a scalable system that can handle more than 100 million metrics per second, and retain up to 13 months of data. Sysdig is the monitoring solution for IBM Cloud Platform, one of the largest Prometheus monitoring deployments today.

With Sysdig, teams can adopt Prometheus compatible monitoring using an enterprise-ready platform.

Other enhancements

• Long-term datastore: With Sysdig data storage, Prometheus metrics are stored for 13 months, instead of just days or weeks. This gives DevOps teams access to long-term analysis to make better-informed capacity planning and resource usage decisions.
• Out-of-the-box Kubernetes dashboards: Sysdig reduces complexity and time to production with out-of-the-box Kubernetes dashboards. By bringing together platform monitoring and workload monitoring, DevOps teams can resolve issues faster.

“Prometheus brings tremendous value to developers, which is why we standardized our monitoring approach on the open source project,” said Payal Chakravarty, vice president, product management at Sysdig.

“There are, however, scaling challenges for the enterprise. By extending Prometheus monitoring, we’re able to help enterprises to use the Prometheus monitoring approach they love, while also giving them the scale, workflows, controls, and insights they need to maximize performance and availability.”

The Sysdig approach

To date, Sysdig is the only security company to support a secure DevOps approach by integrating monitoring and security into a single platform. Cloud teams can embed security, maximize availability, and ensure compliance. By integrating security into the DevOps process, teams can realize the business goals in their transition to cloud native.

Sysdig is a strong advocate for open source technologies, including three open source technologies created by the company, sysdig, sysdig Inspect, and Falco, an open source cloud-native runtime security project. Currently, Falco is an incubation-level hosted project in the CNCF.