Guest post by Jonathan Brown, Sr. Analyst, ESG
As enterprises have made a clear shift toward cloud native applications, tools, and services, IT teams and developers have looked for ways to make observability a force multiplier. Instead of simply using it to handle monitoring or tracing for different parts of their environments, organizations want end-to-end observability that delivers insights to improve performance, make smarter decisions, and enable them to get the most from their cloud native applications.
Having observability solutions that are cloud native, not just lifted and shifted from legacy environments, is essential because cloud native applications are designed and developed from the start for easier scalability as well as improved resiliency, security, and flexibility. Of course, when considering observability for cloud native applications, organizations must also take into account that the infrastructure stack those applications run on is very different even from that in hybrid cloud environments.
As IT environments become more diverse and complex, decision-makers are having to devote more time and resources to observability throughout the infrastructure and application stacks. Unfortunately, the way many organizations have done this is to layer on multiple observability tools, often a different one for each function.
TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group research found that 60% of organizations are using more than 10 different observability tools.1 In many cases, this observability tool sprawl has not improved performance and accuracy, but diminished it.
Observability born in the cloud
Legacy observability tools often are ineffective in today’s cloud-centric environments because they weren’t designed for technologies like containers and microservices. To achieve more observability in cloud native applications designed to facilitate an organization’s cloud journey, enterprises need a next-generation observability solution — one born in the cloud.
Modern observability tools must account for the essential interdependencies of decentralized, complex IT environments in which IT teams face challenges such as sharing mission-critical data created in one system and edited in another and migrating workloads using that data from cloud to cloud or even to an on-premises system. Organizations also need observability tools that scale rapidly and widely to handle massive data sets.
In addition, observability tools must reliably and accurately correlate a single view of the data across different applications, data sources, devices, and clouds. And, of course, this must be done as cost efficiently and quickly as possible, as organizations continue to strive for rapid time to value.
Chronosphere and Google Cloud collaborate for cloud native observability at scale
To achieve hyper-accurate and real-time observability of cloud native application behavior, organizations would be wise to look for tight relationships between their cloud service platform of choice and real-world-tested observability tools for that platform. Chronosphere has such a working relationship with Google Cloud, and focuses heavily on the cloud native application needs of organizations that run those systems in a Google Cloud environment.
Chronosphere itself utilizes Google Cloud to run its business. The company’s observability suite is a software as a service (SaaS) solution, with Chronosphere systems hosted on Google Cloud and tightly aligned with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), a highly regarded Kubernetes service for Google Cloud environments.
Chronosphere deliberately selected Google Cloud as the focus of its efforts because of the ability to offer reliable, highly resilient performance at scale. This capability is extremely important for cloud native applications, because such container-based systems tend to generate very large amounts of monitoring data compared with more monolithic, on-premises or VM-based environments.
Chronosphere’s observability platform is optimized for customized control of data used for DevOps requirements. The company has demonstrated a real-world capability to scale its solution to as much as 2 billion data points per second. In addition, new Control Plane enhancements allow it to provide customers with full visibility into what observability data is valuable so they can make the best possible optimization decisions. This results in lower costs, improved developer productivity and faster problem resolution.
Senior Analyst Jon Brown is lead analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group for Observability, IT Operations, and Sustainability at Enterprise Strategy Group. Jon has 20+ years of experience in IT product management as well as serving as Publisher and VP of Market Insights for Enterprise Strategy Group’s
parent company, TechTarget.
1. “Distributed Cloud Series: Observability and Demystifying AIOps,” TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, 2023
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