Moogsoft are the self-proclaimed “leading provider of operational intelligence for the new era of software”. To ensure that they’re firmly at the cutting edge of new technology, they’ve enhanced their Incident.MOOG software product – a service which provides deep monitoring support for hype-laden Docker container environments, as well as open source cloud computing platform OpenStack.
The idea of containerization – running your distributed applications within a single layer of software which can run seamlessly across all kinds of computing environments – is the latest twist on virtualisation, and one which has gained a lot of traction given Docker’s $65m funding this year alone. But containerisation in production poses new DevOps challenges; namely, if a problem occurs, it’s difficult to ascertain if it’s due to the application, the container, the cloud, or elsewhere in the IT stack. This is where Moogsoft come in – its software acts as an early warning system to detect problems as they unfold, then clusters related alerts using machine learning to help pinpoint root cause by monitoring status data pushed by the entire environment in real-time.
“About a dozen of our online and traditional enterprise customers are building Docker farms on top of OpenStack clouds right now,” said Rob Markovich, chief marketing officer at Moogsoft. “They drove the requirements for this new capability because they have no tools to give them visibility and monitoring to keep the Docker environment running smoothly.”
Incident.MOOG also allows for:
- Taking events from all areas in the container stack out of the box, including from the containers themselves, the output logs of the containerized apps, the management software like Shipyard and Ansible, and the monitoring systems like Nagios, Sensu and New Relic
- Integrating tightly into the Docker API and Openstack API to instrument the core platforms of containerization
- Providing a standard REST-based API to facilitate data integrations into Incident.MOOG (made even easier with a Node.js plug-in)
- Automatically finding anomalies as they unfold, then clustering related events according to Docker groups (linked and unlinked), Openstack cell or host UUID, and output from deployment automation platforms, e.g. Ansible, Chef, SaltStack
- Communicating over Docker API to dynamically monitor containers as they are turned up and turned down
Integrating support for innovative technologies such as Docker and OpenStack demonstrates MoogSoft’s commitment to making the lives of DevOps teams easier across ever-evolving technology stacks. If they continue to keep apace as new technologies emerge, the future certainly looks bright for MoogSoft.
(Image credit: Moogsoft)
