LogicMonitor Adds Support for Kubernetes
LogicMonitor this week added support for Kubernetes to its namesake IT monitoring platform delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.
At the same time, LogicMonitor unfurled LM Service Insight, which is designed to make it easier for IT teams to logically monitor group applications and associated infrastructure that make up a service.
Gadi Oren, vice president of product for LogicMonitor, says in addition to aggregating key performance indicators (KPIs), LM Service Insight automatically generates service topologies alongside monitoring and alert data.
The rise of microservices enabled by containers running on Kubernetes is accelerating a transition to a more services-based approach to managing IT, says Oren. Rather than monitoring applications and infrastructure in isolation, IT organizations are pursuing more holistic approaches to managing entire IT services end to end.
Many IT organizations are faced with an IT environment that today is more complex than ever. In addition to legacy applications running on virtual and physical machines, the rapid adoption of microservices-based applications running on Kubernetes clusters is adding another layer of abstraction that needs to be managed, says Oren, noting that new layer of computing is much more ephemeral than legacy systems, thanks to the ability to almost rip and replace containers at will.
However, IT organizations don’t necessarily want to add another tool just to manage Kubernetes clusters, Oren says. By adding support for Kubernetes to LogicMonitor, an IT organization can use the same set of SaaS-based monitoring tools to manage a hybrid computing environment spanning cloud services and on-premises IT systems.
A major battle is shaping up between providers of tools for legacy IT environments and startup companies that are focusing their efforts primarily on providing tools for Kubernetes clusters. It’s not clear to what degree every provider of tools for legacy IT environments will be able to support Kubernetes. Nor is it clear whether existing IT teams will become responsible for managing Kubernetes or whether DevOps teams specifically organized around Kubernetes deployments will take the lead.
Regardless of how the IT management team is structured, however, it is clear that IT operations management fundamentally changes once Kubernetes is added to an IT environment. As the environment becomes more dynamic, LogicMonitor is betting the number of IT organizations that will prefer to shift the management plane for IT into the cloud will increase steadily. After all, the onus for staying current on instances of Kubernetes that, for example, are updated every quarter now shifts to the provider of the cloud applications employed to manage those clusters.
How extensive that transition might be will vary depending on how regulations within a specific vertical industry require IT management tools to be deployed on-premises. But at a time when IT teams need access to more sophisticated tools than ever, it’s becoming increasingly impractical to rely on legacy IT management frameworks, which might get updated once a year if the internal IT team is lucky enough.
