Chronosphere has added a professional services capability through which it will provide the resources and expertise needed to deploy and manage its observability platform.
Ian Smith, field CTO for Chronosphere, said the Chronosphere Quick Start program will make it easier for organizations to transition away from legacy monitoring tools that only track a set of pre-defined metrics and embrace an observability platform that enables DevOps teams to surface issues before an IT environment is disrupted.
The scope of the services provided spans everything from data ingestion to providing training so that management of the Chronosphere observability platform can eventually be handed over to an internal DevOps team.
The professional services team will also guide DevOps teams through setting up data control mechanisms and retention polices in addition to crafting dashboards to monitor specific processes.
Finally, there’s also a self-paced online learning platform, dubbed Chronosphere University, that provides a comprehensive curriculum to help DevOps teams navigate fundamentals, advanced features and best practices.
It’s still early days as far as the adoption of observability platforms is concerned. But it’s apparent that as application environments become more complex, the plethora of monitoring tools that DevOps teams rely on will need to be streamlined. Observability platforms promise to unify logs, metrics and traces in a way that makes it simpler to launch queries to identify the root cause of an issue.
The rate at which DevOps teams will embrace observability will naturally vary, but the biggest technical obstacles are deploying and configuring the platform, loading data and managing the cost of storing all the data that is collected.
In addition, DevOps teams also need to understand what queries to launch to investigate specific issues. Many DevOps teams lack the expertise required to frame those queries today, but it’s expected that machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) will automatically identify issues that might lead to disruption.
In the meantime, DevOps teams should be evaluating where it makes sense to continue to rely on monitoring tools. In many instances, an observability platform might obviate the need for that tool, but there may also be plenty of instances where a simple monitoring tool is sufficient for the task at hand.
One way or another, however, more advanced observability capabilities will be needed as application environments continue to become more complex in the cloud-native era. Application environments now consist of a mix of monolithic and microservices-based applications that gain more dependencies with each passing day. An application may not be as prone to crash as it once was, but determining the root cause of a performance issue can still take weeks given all the dependencies that exist between various services.
Regardless of approach, observability has always been a core tenet of DevOps. As organizations’ DevOps maturity increases, the greater the appreciation for it becomes. The challenge has been that observability is one of many DevOps things that are easier said than done.
