August 2015 Summaries

Sysdig 0.1.103 introduces several new features and improvements, enhancing its functionality and compatibility. This release includes support for RHEL Atomic Host, CentOS Atomic Host, and Fedora Atomic Host, along with new chisels that record and display HTTP requests, aiding in web server monitoring. Additionally, the sysdig driver now accommodates CPU hotplugging, beneficial for dynamic production environments. The update also includes various bug fixes, such as improving compatibility with GCC 5 and enhancing the accept system event with additional queue metrics. Precompiled sysdig-probe versions are now available for major Linux distributions, and community support continues through the sysdig mailing list and GitHub for issue reporting.

Sysdig Cloud has introduced enhanced support for containerized environments by implementing application checks for popular IT technologies such as ElasticSearch, HAProxy, Redis, Memcached, and RabbitMQ, among others. Utilizing their unique ContainerVision™ technology, Sysdig Cloud enables the automatic detection and collection of in-depth metrics from these applications without requiring additional instrumentation or configuration, thus maintaining the integrity of containerized setups. This approach allows users to access detailed performance metrics and manage applications effectively without compromising security or deviating from Docker's philosophy of running a single process per container. By simply deploying a Sysdig Cloud container on a host, users gain comprehensive visibility into their containerized applications, transforming monitoring into a seamless microservice experience.

Sysdig's release of version 0.1.102 introduces file rotation for continuous capture, a feature that prevents trace files from growing unbounded by automatically splitting them into multiple, manageable files. This enhancement is particularly beneficial for monitoring, troubleshooting, and post-mortem analysis, as it allows users to set simple policies that control how trace data is divided and retained, ultimately limiting disk space usage. Users familiar with tcpdump will find file rotation similar, and sysdig offers flexibility with command-line flags to define file size, timespan, or number of events per file, as well as the number of files to retain. The feature is versatile, supporting various use cases such as capturing application activity before a crash, monitoring commands in a container, or logging specific outputs, and it can also be applied to existing trace files for further data segmentation.