Sysdig Extends Portfolio of Container Management Tools

At the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 event, Sysdig today added Sysdig Advisor, a Kubernetes troubleshooting tool, and extended the reach of the Sysdig Open Source incident response tool to add support for public clouds.

Aaron Newcomb, director of product marketing for Sysdig, says Sysdig Advisor is designed to make it simpler for IT teams of varying skill levels to resolve Kubernetes issues without having to master a command line interface (CLI). Instead, Sysdig Advisor makes all relevant capacity, event, alert and troubleshooting information available for clusters, namespaces, workloads and pods via a graphical user interface (GUI). It then surfaces a prioritized list of issues and associated live logs to reduce the time required to resolve an issue, adds Newcomb.

That approach also eliminates the need to rely on tools such as kubectl that, from a security perspective, may grant too many permissions, he notes.

Sysdig Advisor extends the company’s portfolio that currently includes Sysdig Monitor, a service based on open source Prometheus software and Sysdig Secure, a service for finding and prioritizing software vulnerabilities, detecting and responding to threats and managing cloud configurations, permissions and compliance.

In addition, Sysdig Open Source gives IT teams incident response software that can observe containers in real-time, including file system access and network activity. It provides advanced filtering and troubleshooting capabilities to identify root causes of security and performance issues.

Using a new plugin framework originally developed for Falco—an open source tool for protecting container runtimes developed by Sysdig and now being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)—it is now possible to connect Sysdig Open Source to any platform that generates logs or events, including cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google.

Sysdig has been making a case for integrating container and security management via the cloud services it provides for some time. The goal is to make managing and securing containers and Kubernetes platforms easier either for the average IT administrator or site reliability engineers (SREs) that simply need a tool to perform a task faster. Sysdig claims Sysdig Advisor enables an IT team to perform Kubernetes management tasks 10 times faster.

It’s not clear whether making Kubernetes easier to manage will impact adoption rates. Many IT teams are still intimidated by the complexity of the platform, so tools that make it more accessible could play a critical role in spurring increased adoption. Arguably, one of the things holding back Kubernetes adoption is the lack of IT professionals that have mastered command line tools.

One way or another, however, Kubernetes clusters are starting to proliferate across enterprise IT environments as more microservices-based applications built using containers are deployed. Many enterprise IT organizations are already finding themselves managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters. The challenge is finding a way to simplify the management of clusters that are often distributed across an extended enterprise.