SUSE Acquires StackState for Cloud-Native Observability

June 18, 2024 Steven Vaughan-Nichols cloud native, observability, StackState, SUSE

SUSE today announced it has acquired StackState as part of a plan to embed observability capabilities into its Rancher platform for managing Kubernetes clusters.

Announced at SUSECon event, the StackState observability platform will be embedded into the Rancher Prime version of the platform for enterprise IT teams. Longer term, SUSE envisions applying StackState’s observability capabilities across its portfolio, including areas like cost management, smart issue remediation, environment optimization and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) observability.

Additionally, SUSE plans to make an open source edition of StackState available alongside the rest of its portfolio.

StackState brings to the table end-to-end observability across the entire stack. While many observability tools focus on specific aspects such as metrics or logs, StackState automatically discovers and maps dependencies between all components, including applications, services, infrastructure and cloud resources. It also seamlessly integrates with various cloud platforms, monitoring tools and data sources. For example, StackState supports OpenTelemetry natively and can ingest data from AWS, Dynatrace and Zabbix.

Armed with all these features, StackState empowers IT teams to swiftly identify and resolve issues within their cloud-based containerized environments through a unified observability platform. By integrating StackState into Rancher Prime, SUSE aims to provide customers with a comprehensive view of their entire stack, foster cross-team collaboration, safeguard end-user experiences and streamline cloud-native application management from data centers to the edge and the cloud.

SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen told conference attendees that as cloud workloads become more complex, applications now consist of so many different elements that you need to understand. “You need to have a way to monitor in real-time how they are interacting with each other,” he said.

StackState CEO, Andreas Prins added SUSE’s Rancher Prime is a great fit for our technology and our team. “I’m looking forward to seeing what we have built reach its full potential,” he said.

Of course, StackState isn’t the only such observability platform. Programs such as Elastic Observability and Splunk Observability Cloud also offer robust observability capabilities. Still, StackState’s combination of topology mapping, AI-driven insights and seamless integrations makes it a compelling choice, especially in cloud-native application environments.