OpsRamp Brings AIOps to Kubernetes Environments
For years now, you’ve heard of DevOps as the way to increase velocity from development to deployment and gain insight into how and where you can improve this process. Now, an infusion of AI into DevOps tools has produced AIOps, offering insight and automation into the DevOps lifecycle in ways not previously available to mere humans.
Mahesh Ramachandran, vice president of product management at OpsRamp, says that AI can help reduce alert noise, determine context, and increase DevOps velocity.
“The overall goal here is to take the human out of the equation as much as possible,” said Ramachandran. “When you look at the time IT admins take responding to events, a good chunk of that time is spent discerning signal from noise, creating incidents, and getting the issue to the point where humans can be applied to resolve the issue. Our goal is to eliminate as much of that human time as possible by applying machine learning.”
Earlier this month, hybrid IT infrastructure AIOps platform OpsRamp joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a silver member, and now the company has further shown its dedication to cloud native technologies with the introduction of AIOps for Kubernetes. Ramachandran says that cloud native resources are merely a new form of IT resource, to be treated the same as any other, and should be afforded the same monitoring and management capabilities.
“We see cloud and cloud native as a new environment from an operational standpoint in which IT resources are sourced and used operationally. As customers try to blend assets from traditional, cloud, and cloud native environments, they need to think carefully about their operational models,” said Ramachandran. “Customers need to have unified operational models for this blended service, and OpsRamp helps them stand up and practice a single operational model for this uniquely blended environment. They shouldn’t have to monitor cloud resources differently than physical resources. The task is the same.”
In the company’s “winter release,” it has unveiled monitoring for Kubernetes environments across on-prem and cloud services including Azure Kubernetes Services, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes. According to Ramachandran, OpsRamp provides Kubernetes monitoring through an agent that runs as part of the daemon set of a Kubernetes cluster.
“OpsRamp fits in with the natural way you do things in Kubernetes,” said Ramachandran. “Simply specify in the YAML file a link to the OpsRamp agent, which is packaged as a Docker container image. We do discovery of Kubernetes using the Kubernetes API itself. We discover what is running and then get deployed as part of the data set.”
In addition to Kubernetes support, OpsRamp also now provides cloud event monitoring, allowing it to “collect, aggregate, correlate and escalate events from AWS services such as AWS Health, ECS, Redshift, Data Migration Services, and CloudWatch” and serve “as a single point of monitoring, management, and remediation for cloud events across multiple cloud accounts,” according to a company statement.
Beyond these new additions to OpsRamp’s cloud native feature set, the company also further focused on fine-tuning its AIOps capabilities and providing further context to its users.
In terms of context, OpsRamp provides users with topology maps of IT resources, now including support for more than forty popular enterprise applications, as well as virtual machines, hypervisor servers and clusters in VMware vSphere and KVM environments. The release also includes a new service map interface that “makes it easy to identify underlying resources behind an IT service outage so that operations teams can hone in on the right course of action to restore services.”
Finally, OpsRamp’s expanded AIOps capabilities include new capabilities for OpsQ, the company’s “intelligent event management engine.” These capabilities include auto-incident creation and routing, augmented training for inference models, and frequency-driven alert escalation. For a full dive into OpsRamp’s winter release, give the company’s webinar a gander.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (Kubernetes) is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.
