Patrick Lin, Splunk | Leading with Observability | January 2021
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 22/02/2021

Patrick Lin, VP Product Management, Splunk sits down with John Furrier for a special CUBE Conversation on Leading with Observability. In this segment of the series, Patrick discusses the topic of keeping watch over microservices and containers.

#theCUBE #Splunk

https://siliconangle.com/2021/02/22/splunk-clears-complexity-fog-bring-observability-cloud-device-cubeconversations-observability/

Keeping watch over microservices and containers
The trend for containers and microservices has been driven by the need for speed and scalability in the development pipeline. But cloud architecture is nebulous.

“Rather than have an end to your app that you’re watching over on some hosts that you could reboot when there’s a problem, now you have tens, maybe hundreds of services running on top of maybe hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of containers,” Lin said.

This provides several problems from an observability standpoint: “One is, you need to be tracking this in enough detail and at a high enough resolution in real time so that you know when things are coming in and out,” Lin stated, referring to the act of containers spinning up or down. “But just as important is understanding the dependencies and the relationships between these different services.”

There are plenty of tools out there to accomplish this. Too many, according to Lin.

“I’ve been looking at some of the toolsets that some of our customers have pulled together, and they have the ability to get information about everything, but it’s not woven together in a useful way,” he added. 

An integrated toolset is needed to combat this tool sprawl, and it needs to be a purpose-built, real-time solution, according to Lin.

“It’s hard to retrofit a system,” he said. “You need to start from the very beginning … you need some form of a real-time streaming architecture; something that’s capable of providing that real-time detection and alerting across a very wide range of things in order to handle the scale and the ephemeral nature of cloud environments.”

This is the goal of the Splunk Observability Suite, released as part of the company’s Data-to-Everything Platform during the Splunk .conf20 event in October 2020. The integrated solution provides a single, consistent user experience across metrics, logs, and traces, providing seamless monitoring, troubleshooting, and investigation, Lin explained.

“I’d say we have the industry’s most comprehensive and powerful combination of solutions that will help both sorts of IT and developer operations teams tackle these new challenges for monitoring and observability that other tools simply can’t address,” he added.

“The 5 Foundational DevOps Practices” report from Splunk, which draws from over 3,000 participants, reveals what separates successful DevOps teams from those that fail, outlining the importance of true end-to-end visibility and recommendations for achieving it.