IBM Cloud platform monitoring with Sysdig – Unified metrics for infrastructure, applications, and now, IBM services.

Last year, IBM and Sysdig announced IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig, a fully managed, enterprise-grade monitoring service for application visibility, alerting, and troubleshooting to replace our legacy Cloud Monitoring service, which has been deprecated and is going completely offline as of March 31, 2020.

Enterprise development and IT teams that build, ship, and run business-critical applications at scale have been using IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig to monitor their infrastructure and containerized environments on any host where the Sysdig agent can be deployed. 

Today, we are announcing a recent enhancement that integrates metrics from IBM Cloud services (aka platform metrics) to deliver a unified view of all resources so that users can monitor their applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, and optimize resource utilization. 

With our new platform monitoring support, users can monitor IBM Cloud services and resources where an agent cannot be installed. Also, IBM Services have made service-specific metrics available, so customers have a single user interface to view them along with their infrastructure and custom application metrics in the Sysdig UI. 

As the complexity of cloud architecture increases, organizations face new challenges when monitoring applications, services, and the cloud infrastructure itself. As a result, traditional monitoring tools are not enough. Furthermore, how quickly can your DevOps team identify and resolve problems with traditional monitoring methods? What happens as the number of hosts, applications, and services grow exponentially over time and the environment becomes too complex to manage?

IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig is the preferred IBM Cloud solution for access to all your performance and operational data from a single platform and is available in all six multi-zone regions. 

Enabling platform metrics 

Platform metrics are metrics that are exposed by enabled services across the IBM Cloud platform. These services have made metrics and pre-defined dashboards for their services available by publishing metrics associated with the customer’s space or account. Customers can view these platform metrics alongside the metrics from their applications and other services within IBM Cloud monitoring. 

Platform metrics are regional, so you must configure a Sysdig instance in the same region as your service to receive the platform metrics. If a Sysdig instance in a region is already enabled to collect platform metrics, the metrics are collected automatically and available for monitoring through this instance. 

Today, customers can receive specific metrics for IBM Event Streams, IBM Cloud Databases, and IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), with other key services including Cloud Functions and Cloud Object Storage in the process of onboarding to Sysdig. 

Metrics for IBM Event Streams 

IBM Event Streams for IBM Cloud is Apache-Kafka-as-a-Service for IBM Cloud. It is optimized for event ingestion into IBM Cloud and event stream distribution between your services and applications. Utilizing the metrics available within Sysdig for Event Streams enables you to make the most efficient use of your event streaming infrastructure as your application teams build real-time intelligent applications.

To start using Event Streams metrics, you must provision a Sysdig instance and enable platform metrics for the Sysdig instance. Once you launch out to the Sysdig Monitor UI, you can use the pre-defined IBM Event Streams dashboard that will report on the health, performance, and state of your Event Streams instance.

The dashboard will be available once metrics have started recording, which may take a few minutes to initialize. You can then copy and share dashboards through the Web UI or run scripts to save, create new, or restore dashboards. 

Metrics for IBM Cloud Databases

The IBM Cloud Databases (ICD) portfolio—which consists of Databases for Elasticsearch, Databases for etcd, Databases for MongoDB, Databases for PostgreSQL, Messages for RabbitMQ and Databases for Redis—is now integrated with Sysdig Monitoring. All offerings are fully managed, highly available, and built from the ground up with enterprise security in mind. In addition, all databases come with serverless auto-scaling, backup orchestration, and bring-your-own-encryption-key integrations for data at rest. 

By simply setting up IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig with platform metrics enabled, a customer will automatically receive metrics for all provisioned IBM Cloud Databases instances. Even more, a customer can direct launch into pre-canned database dashboards and monitor real-time data like connections and resource consumption or do system diagnostics retrospectively. In addition, database metrics can be used to define alerts to react on unplanned occurrences.

Check out the Databases for PostgreSQL documentation for information on how to get started with the service. 

Try it today

Modern applications generate large volumes of data in the form of metrics, logs, and events. The IBM Observability portfolio including Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig, Log Analysis with LogDNA, and Cloud Activity Tracker with LogDNA enables you to collect, access, and correlate data on a single platform from across all IBM resources, applications, and services that run on IBM Cloud so you can easily gain system-wide visibility for faster problem resolution. 

Create an IBM Cloud account to check out the new services and all their features, free of cost for a limited trial period.