CoScale Full Stack Container and Microservice Monitoring

by David Widen | Tuesday, May 23, 2017 | CoScale Docker

The Modern Application Monitoring Problem

Modern application architecture has shifted away from the monolithic paradigm in favor of smaller conglomerations of services called microservices. The microservice model focuses on breaking apart these monolithic legacy applications into their smallest constituent pieces, often deployed as Docker containers. This improves their performance, fault tolerance, and reliability. However, it also introduces added complexity.

This paradigm shift changes the application distribution on physical servers from 1-to-1 to many-to-1. In addition, these Docker containers are ephemeral: they may only run for a short time and relocate as well. This provides organizations extreme flexibility and allows them to better utilize hardware resources. However, monitoring a distributed, ephemeral, and dynamic modern application is very challenging and large enterprises are struggling to adjust.

Enter [CoScale][2]. CoScale is a full stack monitoring solution for modern containerized applications and microservices. It was built from the ground-up with containers in mind and provides a full stack monitoring solution that will fit your company's needs.

Lightweight Monitoring Agent

The lightweight CoScale agent is deployed as a Docker container and will automatically be distributed to all of your hosts through your orchestrator. It can also be deployed as a singleton Docker container per host, as well as a package. CoScale only deploys a single agent per host to minimize the impact on application performance. It supports all modern operating systems including Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat, Windows Server and Debian. CoScale supports dozens of applications out of the box, with simple scripts to create and send custom metrics. In addition, it has no external dependencies.

Full Stack Performance Monitoring

As soon as CoScale receives metrics data, it will automatically create dashboards for every application being monitored, in addition to a few high-level views of your system. These dashboards are fully customizable and let you go from high-level views all the way down to introspecting specific servers, containers, and applications. A common use case is to create a high-level dashboard showing the overall health of your distributed microservice cluster, with “click through” widgets allowing you to further introspect into your environment.

In addition, CoScale uses powerful algorithms to automatically calculate anomalies. Regardless of the metric, CoScale will identify any anomalies and then alert your system administrator to help keep your applications and infrastructure healthy. CoScale also ships with an alerting system that directly integrates with e-mail, slack, or a third-party tool through the use of APIs.

Events For Context

Viewing the performance of your entire cluster is paramount to keeping your applications online. However, it is sometimes very challenging to determine the cause of performance degradation. It is easy to observe that the page load time for your web application has increased by 30%, but why?** **CoScale solves this problem through the use of its eventing system. CoScale automatically hooks into the events such as deployments. It will overlay these events onto your dashboards to provide context to help determine the cause of problems that affect your infrastructure.

If the built-in eventing system isn't enough for your organization, you can always monitor custom events to overlay onto your performance graphs and provide the context your organization requires.

The Best Container-First Microservice Monitoring Solution

To summarize, CoScale is the best container-first microservice monitoring solution. It was built from the ground up with containers in mind, and will seamlessly integrate into your microservice architecture. Extremely easy to set up, CoScale provides full stack monitoring all the way up from the operating system to real user monitoring of web applications. It uses an extremely lightweight, production-grade agent deployed as a Docker container. With automatic anomaly detection, you will be alerted if there is any unexpected change to your cluster's performance. Debugging software and infrastructure problems has never been easier with CoScale's eventing system. Deploy CoScale using a SaaS solution, or behind your firewall today!