Observe, New Relic boost observability of Kubernetes workloads

Kubernetes Explorer integrates with Observe’s AI Investigator to speed root-cause analysis and problem resolution by analyzing every component of a distributed platform, including the Kubernetes platform. It builds custom, incident-specific visualizations and offers suggestions to IT teams to accelerate troubleshooting and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR). Kubernetes Explorer can also provide visibility into the historical state of Kubernetes components, enabling IT professionals to better understand performance issues and resolve them. The add-on provides an overview of the entire Kubernetes environment and allows users to dig into data on specific clusters, namespaces, nodes, pods, containers, and deployed workloads, the company says.

Observe is a SaaS platform, and customers deploy Observe agents to collect telemetry data. The agents can collect data from a variety of sources, including infrastructure such as Kubernetes, databases such as MongoDB or Snowflake, and other applications. The agents collect time-series data, logs, traces/spans, and performance data from these various sources and send the data to Observe’s platform. Observe then takes the raw telemetry data and curates, normalizes, and structures it to make it more easily navigable and usable for troubleshooting by customer teams.

Customers access the Observe platform with a web-based user interface, which provides observability and troubleshooting tools and capabilities. Primarily Observe is used by DevOps teams, site reliability engineers, and engineering teams. Kubernetes Explorer is available to all Observe customers at no additional cost.

New Relic targets Kubernetes workloads

Separately, New Relic announced “one-step observability for Kubernetes” that will provide developers with monitoring capabilities for dynamic Kubernetes environments to accelerate up incident resolution and improve developer productivity. With this release, New Relic provides complete visibility across applications and Kubernetes workloads, enabling teams to quickly identify and resolve issues, according to the company.

“Modern organizations are embracing Kubernetes to drive innovation and efficiency gains, but this often comes with trade-offs in performance management,” said Manav Khurana, New Relic chief product officer, in a statement. “New Relic simplifies observability workloads for Kubernetes environments so that developer and platform teams can more easily monitor their stacks—all with intelligent insights driven by our AI-strengthened Intelligent Observability platform.”

Monitoring the performance of applications deployed on Kubernetes components introduces unique challenges, New Relic says, requiring developer and platform teams to install application performance monitoring (APM) and Kubernetes integrations separately to achieve observability, which can be a time-consuming and cumbersome process. New Relic now automatically instruments APM with Kubernetes and also provides AI insights into the environment.