Honeycomb Extends Observability Reach to Kubernetes
Honeycomb today announced it has extended the reach of it observability platform to include Kubernetes environments.
Honeycomb for Kubernetes enables IT teams to declare which events they want to analyze and then pull all the raw data associated with those events into a Honeycomb cloud service where analytics can be applied to Kubernetes events, metrics and trace attributes more cost-effectively at scale.
Honeycomb CTO Charity Majors said that approach makes it simpler to troubleshoot issues in complex Kubernetes environments where there is a lot of high-cardinality data that needs to be analyzed to correlate application requests with specific Kubernetes pods, nodes or cluster configurations.
The company makes use of open source OpenTelemetry agent software being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) along with its own low-code agent software to collect that data.
IT teams can also take advantage of query and generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools that the company already provides.
It’s still early days as far as the adoption of observability platforms is concerned, but it’s apparent that as application environments become more complex, the plethora of monitoring tools that most IT teams rely on need to be augmented using platforms that make it possible to investigate and correlate anomalous events. Observability platforms promise to unify logs, metrics and traces to make it simpler to launch queries to identify the root cause of an issue.
The rate at which IT teams embrace observability will naturally vary, but the biggest obstacle might not be the platforms themselves. Understanding what queries to craft to surface the root cause of an IT issue before there is a major disruption requires a level of expertise that is often challenging to find and retain. That’s especially true for Kubernetes environments where there is already a chronic shortage of expertise emerging as more Kubernetes clusters are deployed in production environments to run cloud-native applications. Observability platforms enable IT teams to handle the increased levels of entropy that will inevitably ensue, said Majors.
It’s not clear whether the inherent complexity of Kubernetes is holding up increased adoption, but there is no doubt Kubernetes is one of the most powerful and complex IT platforms to ever find its way into enterprise IT environments. The challenge IT teams regularly encounter is that, given how highly configurable Kubernetes is, it’s easy for mistakes to be made. That creates a need to be able to debug those environments quickly, noted Majors.
As IT environments continue to become more complex, it’s more a question of the degree to which organizations will be embracing observability rather than if they will do so. As a core tenet of DevOps best practices, IT teams that programmatically manage IT environments tend to be at the forefront of the adoption of these platforms. However, it’s already apparent that observability is being extended well beyond DevOps workflows. The challenge and the opportunity now is to make observability platforms as accessible as possible to IT professionals of all skill levels.
