Oracle Launches Observability Platform

Oracle, at its online Oracle Live event today, unveiled the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform, which combines newly added logging, log analytics, database management, application performance monitoring, operations insights and service connector hub services with existing Oracle monitoring, notifications, events, functions, streaming and operating system management capabilities.

Dan Koloski, vice president of product management for Oracle, said the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform provides IT organizations with access to a unified observability platform running on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service that, in keeping with best DevOps practices, offers more context than traditional monitoring tools.

In addition to being able to observe applications deployed on Oracle infrastructure, on-premises or in the cloud, the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform interoperates with Slack, Grafana, Twilio, PagerDuty and other platforms to enable organizations to craft end-to-end DevOps workflows, Koloski added. Oracle is also working toward making it possible to import and export data to open source Prometheus monitoring platforms, noted Koloski.

Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform employs machine learning algorithms to automatically detect anomalies and enable remediation in near-real-time. The company has also automated the instrumentation process to the point of one-click agent deployment, he added.

Koloski said IT organizations are moving to rationalize a raft of tools to monitor silos of applications and infrastructure that historically were employed with mixed success. An observability platform provides more context by unifying all those tools in a way that makes it easier to troubleshoot the overall IT environment, he noted.

As IT environments become more complex, thanks mainly to the rise of microservices and containers across hybrid cloud computing environments, Koloski said a new approach to managing IT is required. Advances in observability in the form of distributed traces are also creating a need to shift IT monitoring platforms to the cloud, as the amount of data that needs to be analyzed steadily increases, noted Koloski.

With the launch of Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform, Oracle is also signaling that database management is being incorporated into DevOps processes, Koloski said.

IT teams today still spend a fair amount of time in “war rooms” trying to ascertain the root cause of an application performance issue. Observability platforms promise to reduce the amount of time IT teams need to spend trying to determine the root cause of those issues. Most of the time it only takes a few minutes to fix an issue that an IT team may have spent weeks trying to uncover.

Of course, embracing an observability platform doesn’t necessarily mean an IT organization has embraced best DevOps practices. However, because observability is a core tenet of DevOps, it does mean a lot more IT teams will be further down that path.