OBSERVABILITY AND ANALYTICS FOR MODERN CLOUD APPLICATIONS www.netsil.com NETS I L
OVERVIEW Netsil is the observability and analytics company for modern cloud applications. The Netsil Application Operations Center (AOC) helps SREs and DevOps improve the reliability of production applications. Today s applications are highly service-oriented, API driven, & implemented using many heterogeneous stacks. While applications have been growing in complexity, the needs of operations teams have been woefully underserved thus creating enormous business risks. Netsil AOC takes a fundamentally new approach that addresses the critical needs of operations teams. TABLE OF CONTENTS OVERVIEW 2 OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES IN MODERN CLOUD APPLICATIONS 3 TIME TO RETHINK YOUR MONITORING APPROACH 4 NETSIL APPLICATION OPERATIONS CENTER (AOC) APPROACH 5 HOW NETSIL AOC WORKS 6 AOC BENEFITS 7-8 CONCLUSION 9 2
OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES IN MODERN CLOUD APPLICATIONS Rise of public clouds, SaaS, DevOps and microservices has created a perfect tsunami for operations teams working with modern cloud applications. Complexity and velocity of application changes have created several blind spots and caused serious frustration for operations teams. Widely acknowledged pain points include: Too many tools and dashboards yet no way to visualize and understand all internal & external service dependencies. Increasing production outages due to frequent continuous deploys, higher application complexity and worsening Mean- Time-To-Resolution (MTTR). Massive alert fatigue and redundant notifications from storms of low-level infrastructure alerts rather than insightful signals that focus on Service-level Objectives (SLOs). Operations teams unable to work independently because of dependency on app developers for setting up code-based agents and metrics. Too many blind spots in production applications due to framework-dependent monitoring solutions that don t work with heterogeneous stacks and external APIs. 3 All Rights Reserved
TIME TO RETHINK YOUR MONITORING APPROACH Modern cloud applications have several important characteristics that make current monitoring techniques ineffective and demand a fundamentally new approach. Service-oriented architecture: Modern applications are composed of many services. This creates a fundamental challenge for operations teams - how to visualize and understand the services that makeup the application? Existing monitoring approaches fail to deliver this fundamental observability for service-oriented applications. Services are pets, instances are cattle: Services are the critical components of modern applications. Services are architected with built-in redundancy such that multiple equivalent instances (i.e VMs or containers) power the service. So issues at an instance-level may not result in service-level issues. Current monitoring techniques, however, provide no way of aggregating instances into services and inundate operations teams with thousands of low-level alerts. There is no way for operations teams to define and monitor service-level KPIs. DevOps pace: Applications change more frequently in production due to adoption of agile practices such as DevOps. Code-embedded and log based techniques are particularly illsuited for such environments because they make operations team heavily dependent on development teams. If code doesn t generate metrics or logs then operations team will have no insight into services, creating very risky blind-spot for production operations. Multi/Hybrid-cloud: Applications increasingly span private and public clouds leveraging services such as S3, RDS, ELB, etc. Additionally, applications rely on many external SaaS services from Google, Stripe, Salesforce, etc. Traditional codeembedded or log analysis approachs are of no use to identify and understand these external service dependencies because they don t capture any metrics for external API interactions. 4
NETSIL APPLICATION OPERATIONS CENTER (AOC) APPROACH Considering the highly dynamic, highly distributed and increasingly hybrid nature of modern applications, Netsil AOC has taken a fundamentally new approach for monitoring modern cloud applications. Network as vantage point for application observability: Netsil AOC auto-generates complete application topology map by capturing live service interactions. Using network as the sourceof-truth, AOC can easily observe dynamic, service-oriented applications. This approach makes Netsil AOC completely programming language and framework-agnostic and doesn t require any change to application code. Observe service-level KPIs, perform instance-level forensics: Netsil AOC automatically aggregates similar instances into services based on their communication signatures. Operations team can easily define and monitor KPIs for these services. At the same time, Netsil AOC gathers all the instance-level metrics into a time-series database. So operations teams can easily do a top-down forensic analysis starting at service-level and drilling down to instance-level. Complete real-time and historical data retention & analytics: Netsil AOC stores all the metrics from live service interactions in an efficient time-series database. Using the time-series database, analytical services can run continuous queries on real-time metrics, run ad-hoc queries to detect anomalies, generate alerts on Service-level Objective (SLO) violations or render advanced data visualizations. 5 All Rights Reserved
HOW NETSIL AOC WORKS The Netsil AOC is delivered as a self-hosted product that works in your cloud environment. AOC supports all common cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMware, OpenStack as well as container frameworks: Kubernetes, Mesosphere and Docker. Netsil AOC is deployed in your private network and gathers metrics using lightweight collectors installed on hosts. Once AOC is installed, operations team can instantly visualize complete application topology, understand service dependencies and gain insights on service-level KPIs using out-of-the-box dashboards. SERVICE INTERACTIONS YOUR CLOUD ENVIRONMENT 1. SPIN UP AN IMAGE 2. INSTALL COLLECTORS ON HOSTS 3. GET STARTED WITH NETSIL 6
AOC BENEFITS VISUAL DEVOPS: Auto-discover complete application topology that provides visibility into services and their interactions. Services are discovered and automatically grouped based on their API & communication signatures. Greatly reduce MTTR by quickly identifying bottlenecks in complex service dependencies Drill-down to infrastructure view for root cause analysis Visualize service health, error rates and top KPIs in broader application context UNIVERSAL OBSERVABILITY: Leverage network as the vantage point to deliver a framework and language agnostic solution that evolves with your application Doesn t require any code instrumentation Captures external API interactions such as with Stripe, Google Authentication, Salesforce Integrates with all common protocols such as REST, HTTP/S, DNS, MySQL, Thrift, PostgreSQL, AWS RDS, AWS Aurora Integrates with custom application metrics using standards such as statsd 7 All Rights Reserved
AOC BENEFITS SERVICE-LEVEL ALERTING: Continuously monitor and trigger alerts on service-level objectives (SLOs) that impact end-user experience and application uptime Service-level alerts eliminate alert fatigue caused by storms of instance-level alerts Out-of-box alerting for golden signals such as latency, error rates, throughput and saturation Get notified using emails or external providers such as Pagerduty REAL-TIME, INTERACTION ANALYTICS Analyze metrics from present or any time in past, to understand application changes and failure progression Time travel to replay application KPIs and topology changes Dashboards with sub-second metrics resolution Template dashboards build once, apply to many services ENTERPRISE GRADE SOLUTION Self-hosted solution ensures security, control and avoids sending sensitive data to external cloud services Easy installation on all common platforms AWS, Azure, Mesosphere, Docker, Kubernetes Zero-Ops with built-in upgrade, self-healing and auto-scaling Auto-backups in an S3 compatible storage backend Share dashboards and reports for troubleshooting 8
CONCLUSION Netsil AOC is the best-of-breed observability and analytics platform built from the ground-up for operations teams. AOC addresses primary challenges faced by operations teams and enables them to improve reliability and performance of modern cloud applications. Since the Netsil AOC does not require any changes to application, it is future-proof against any application evolution that lies on the horizon. 9 All Rights Reserved