Wavefront Enterprise-Grade Enhancements Help Reliably and Securely Scale Cloud Applications
The major focus of the Wavefront release for VMworld 2018 is to enable our SaaS and cloud-enabled business customers to be Enterprise-Ready. DevOps teams including SREs and developers in digital enterprises face visibility challenges when monitoring modern cloud applications, often delivered using thousands of serverless functions and containers with lifespans of seconds and high churn. However, the speed of delivery should not impact the performance and security of these applications. To help these teams to securely and reliably grow their digital service in dynamic environments, we are announcing the following enhancements:
Massive Scalability, Monitoring and Analytics, and PKS Integration for Containerized Applications
The constant churn of containers and system-wide refreshes resulting from application development agility and the velocity of code deploys require an adequate monitoring platform to provide uninterrupted monitoring service. There is a known occurrence of large blind spots that might leave critical cloud-native applications (the lifeline of a digital enterprise) unmonitored for 10’s of minutes at a time. In our internal testing, we have shown that Wavefront can ingest, analyze and visualize metrics from 100,000 containers running concurrently. This massive scale gives our customers developing and running containerized applications peace of mind so they can continue growing their digital service without interruptions.
In addition, Wavefront has released a built-in integration with Pivotal Container Service (PKS). It is essential for ensuring proper container scaling since with this deep integration, the Kubernetes and containerized applications observability are enforced from the very start. This integration enables:
- Monitoring of all levels of Kubernetes performance within PKS, with an additional Wavefront quick start from within PKS by entering the Wavefront URL and desired target alerts
- Simplifying resource management with more than 60 charts added and Kube-state metrics – for a holistic understanding of the Kubernetes health within PKS
- Creating pre-defined Wavefront alerts for important KPIs across desired Kubernetes clusters and components enabling easy programmatic configuration changes
New Wavefront Visibility for Serverless AWS Functions Lambda SDK and Delta Counters – Fast and Accurate
Wavefront is introducing new, pre-built dashboards and serverless SDKs: the Wavefront Lambda SDK for Python, Go and Node.js. Developers get first-class integration with AWS Lambda, without the need to go through AWS CloudWatch – by sending standard Lambda metrics as well as custom metrics directly to Wavefront. Both health metrics across all serverless functions and per-function metrics are visualized for quick troubleshooting of issues.
The new Wavefront Lambda SDK is faster, enabling 1-second granularity with almost no delay, as compared to AWS CloudWatch sending Lambda metrics every 5 minutes with 1-minute granularity. This is essential for proper observability of serverless functions that can come and go within seconds.
In addition, for more accurate monitoring and in particular during bursty serverless traffic, Wavefront is releasing Delta Counters, a new metric type. Delta Counters aggregates measurement counters from various sources without losing metrics in the case of timestamp collisions and with no query performance impact in the case of metrics high ingestion rate. With this functionality, developers get:
- Fast Wavefront Lambda SDK for direct sending of metrics to Wavefront without the need to go through less granular, slower and costly AWS CloudWatch
- Native and custom metrics, correlated with other metrics via unified dashboards for faster troubleshooting
- Complete service visibility obtained by aggregating counters from many different serverless functions even in bursty conditions – all delivering more accurate serverless code with Delta Counters
Checkout the Wavefront serverless demo in the video below.
Read the Wavefront documentation to learn more.
Global Cloud Estate Visibility with Enriched AWS Dashboards, New Visualizations, UX Enhancements
SaaS companies and digital enterprises may find it difficult to visualize their distributed cloud assets, particularly with the need to combine digital services dispersed across the globe. To enable easy visualization of AWS cloud assets, Wavefront is releasing a variety of richer AWS dashboards, visualization widgets, and drill path features. Together they provide enhanced, immediate real-time visibility into cloud-native applications using the public cloud, containerized and microservices topologies.
With increase time to value, these prebuilt dashboards provide rich graphical visualizations of cloud service assets, mapping regions across the globe, zones across a region, for all AWS instances across a zone. With new host maps and drill path capabilities, it is possible to seamlessly click and link dashboards, passing relationship context between them.
These new dashboards enable health status views across the entire global AWS footprint, drilling down views of node clusters on any region, and further still onto detailed metric visualizations to any specific compute instance within a zone – to a specific aspect of suspected cause. DevOps teams get new widgets, plus editing via JSON directly with the following benefits:
- Better performance with global AWS cloud estate mapping to see where problems are emerging system-wide
- Click and link to cloud assets and use drill paths across regions, zones, node maps and down to resources
- Accelerated incident resolution using pre-built dasbhoars, new widgets
See the video below to learn about these cool new enhanced AWS dashboards for your global AWS cloud estate – regions, zones and instances.
New Wavefront Enterprise Security Enhancements Deliver Broad and Easy-to-Set Access Control
Wavefront is now offering a variety of security enhancements for cloud-native applications that enable real-time access management of all monitoring entities. One of the key requirements for a growing digital service is around security, compliance and easy management of who has access to digital business insights. And to that end, Wavefront is releasing Access Controls around Entities – starting with dashboards. Wavefront customers can manage user group access to entities with sensitive data, which helps them prevent security accidents.
New security features are accessible via a rich, user-friendly graphical interface that enables single and bulk administrative operations. With the ease of use and integration with permissions and ACLs, sensitive data access is enabled only to authorized users and groups. The new functionality enables Wavefront admins to create or import Users/User Groups, assign permissions, and manage dashboards accessibility.
Wavefront entities (dashboards) can be secured by associating users or user groups with the ACL of the dashboards. You can limit someone’s access to only view the dashboard or grant them the ability to modify it. You can also revoke access to the dashboard by removing the User or User Group from the ACL. Only authorized users can view and modify dashboards.
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