New Relic acquires CoScale to double down on monitoring Kubernetes
- Summary:
- APM provider New Relic acquires CoScale tech and talent in automated Kubernetes monitoring to double down on DevOps support in containers and microservices
CoScale is noted for its use of machine learning to automate monitoring and detection of anomalies and was recently named as a Cool Vendor in Performance Analysis — Analytics and Containers by Gartner.
CoScale co-founders Stijn Polfliet and Frederick Ryckbosch along with other members of its technology team will relocate to join New Relic's European development center in Barcelona, Spain. In a blog post announcing the CoScale acquisition, Director of Product Management for New Relic Infrastructure, Ramon Guiu, writes:
With these additional team members and technology, we are doubling down on our investment into monitoring workloads running on Kubernetes, which has become the de facto standard for orchestrating containerized applications. New Relic already monitors Kubernetes, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and RedHat Openshift ...
CoScale has been a leader in providing powerful container-native monitoring for Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift, providing full-stack container visibility in production environments. We expect the technology will further enable New Relic to serve DevOps teams looking to deploy containers by accelerating our roadmap and building a stronger container and Kubernetes monitoring product.
Monitoring Kubernetes is a complex task
New Relic has seen a continuous rise in adoption of containers among its customers in the past few years, with Kubernetes increasingly becoming the container orchestration platform of choice. In an August blog post, New Relic's product manager for Kubernetes, JF Joly, shared some statistics on Kubernetes usage. These show that the average New Relic customer has 54 deployments running at any given time, with some running up to 1,000 at once. Each deployment averages a half-dozen containers. Joly noted the difficulties of keeping track of deployments and container status.
As diginomica contributor Kurt Marko wrote in a TechTarget article earlier this year, keeping track of microservices and the containers they run in is becoming an increasingly complex task for APM solutions:
If APM and anomaly detection with traditional n-tier networked applications are akin to playing chess, microservices turn the game into 3D chess. Indeed, microservices APM often encompasses more than three dimensions.
With this background, the CoScale acquisition makes a ton of sense. As Peter Arijs, the company's product and marketing manager, told The New Stack last year, automation is essential to track behavior across multiple container instances. This is where its machine learning technology has proven its worth. CoScale uses a lightweight agent written in Go that automatically recognizes what is running in containers and can launch additional tracking to monitor specific applications and the performance impact on users. Arijs explained:
We learn what is normal behavior for a service and based on historical data, we make a prediction of what would be normal behavior today. Another kind of anomaly detection we use is outlier detection. ... We take a learning period, but we combine different techniques to get the best algorithms based on each use case.
My take
Acquiring CoScale will help New Relic keep pace with the rapid growth of container-based microservices architectures at its customers as it continues to find more takers for its infrastructure monitoring products. The missing piece still to complete is to add support for the emerging technology of service mesh and in particular Istio, which adds a network layer of governance, management and communication across multiple microservices. New Relic currently offers Istio monitoring via an adapter built by IBM which is open source and available on Github. I'm told there are plans to offer deeper integration with Istio in the future, but it's too early to share any details at this time.