The major focus of the Wavefront release for VMworld 2018 is to enable our SaaS 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 requires 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 application a peace of mind that 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 additional Wavefront quick start from within PKS by entering Wavefront URL and desired target alerts
- Simplifying resource management with added more than 60 charts and Kube-state metrics – for a holistic understanding of the health of the Kubernetes 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 serverless 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 busty serverless traffic, Wavefront is releasing Delta Counters, a new metric type. Delta Counters aggregate measurement counters from various sources without losing metrics in case of timestamp collisions and with no query performance impact in 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 in correlation via unified dashboards for faster troubleshooting
- Complete service visibility obtained by aggregating counters from many different serverless functions even in bursty conditions and delivering more accurate serverless code with Delta Counters
Checkout the Wavefront serverless demo in the video below.
Read 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 the increase of time to value, prebuilt dashboards provide rich graphical visualizations of cloud service assets, mapping regions across the globe, zones across a region, and to any AWS instance 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 and the following:
- 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 and learn about cool new enhanced AWS dashboards for global AWS cloud estate – regions, zones and instances.
New Wavefront Enterprise Security Enhancements Deliver Fast and Easy Access Control
Wavefront is now offering a variety of security enhancements for cloud-native applications that enable real-time access management of all entities. One of the key requirements for a growing digital service is around security and compliance and easy management of who has access go digital business insights. And to that end, Wavefront is releasing Access Controls around Entities – 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 rich, user-friendly graphical interface that enables single and bulk administrative operations. With the ease of use and integration with existing user groups, 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, user groups with the ACL of the dashboards. You can limit someone’s access to only view the dashboard or also 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.
See Us at VMworld 2018
If you are attending VMworld US 2018, held in Las Vegas, visit Wavefront booth or sign up to see one of many Wavefront sessions. We will be demonstrating these enhancements live here at VMworld 2018. If you don’t have a chance to visit us, please check out our free trial.
