Chronosphere today announced it has acquired Calyptia to add additional pipeline management capabilities to its observability platform.
Calyptia created Fluent Bit and Fluentd, a set of open source log processors that are now being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Chronosphere CEO Martin Mao said these log processors will be embedded into the company’s namesake observability platform to enable the routing, transformation and optimization of log data at scale. That issue has become problematic because cloud-native applications based on microservices create exponentially more telemetry data than legacy monolithic applications. If it becomes too costly to analyze that data, then DevOps teams will begin to limit the number of applications they will observe, noted Mao.
The Calyptia platform achieves that goal using filters at the data source to reduce the volume of data that might otherwise be shared by 30% or more.
The shared data can then be analyzed in real time rather than waiting for it to be stored and indexed. In addition, DevOps teams can enrich that data in flight to include additional context.
Calyptia cofounder Anurag Gupta added that the primary mission for the company has always been to make log data more accessible to developers as they build and deploy applications.
The acquisition of Calyptia comes on the heels of a log management alliance between Chronosphere and CrowdStrike through which a log storage and virtualization capability, dubbed Logs powered by CrowdStrike, has been added to the observability platform. The overall goal is to simplify the management and analysis of logs via a single click of a graphical tool or within the context of a larger DevOps workflow based on a command line interface (CLI) without requiring data engineering expertise, said Mao.
It’s not clear how fully DevOps teams have embraced observability, but it’s apparent the legacy monitoring tools that collect a set of predefined metrics are not able to keep pace with the complexity of cloud-native application environments. An observability platform makes it simpler to query log data and discover the root cause of an issue—hopefully before a catastrophic event occurs. The challenge, of course, is providing that capability without incurring massive increased storage costs for log data.
Despite those concerns, the need for observability is becoming a more pressing issue with each passing day. Organizations have never been more dependent on applications to drive revenue. A degradation in performance is usually an early indicator of a disruption that often has a direct impact on revenue and profitability.
There is, of course, already no shortage of observability platforms. The issue most DevOps teams encounter is finding the funding needed to employ one at a time when organizations have become much more sensitive to IT costs. There may be an opportunity to rationalize some monitoring tools to help pay for the cost of a more modern observability platform, but regardless of approach, an ounce of prevention is always going to be worth a pound of proverbial cure.
