July 2016 Summaries

Sysdig Tracers are an innovative tool designed to provide lightweight, open-source transaction tracing that combines aspects of Zipkin-style tracing, strace-like data collection, and an htop-inspired interface. Positioned as a simplified Application Performance Management (APM) solution, Sysdig Tracers allow users to instrument and monitor various aspects of software execution, from methods and service calls to network requests and shell scripts, by using specially formatted text strings written to /dev/null. These tracers generate events that are integrated into the Sysdig event stream, allowing for detailed analysis and visualization of execution spans within a system. The tool is particularly useful for tracking application transaction times, system-level latencies, and other performance metrics, offering a cost-effective and language-independent alternative to traditional APM tools. By leveraging Sysdig's capabilities, users can capture, filter, and analyze tracer events, making it a versatile tool for both development and production environments, with future plans to expand its feature set to include integrations for common programming languages.

Sysdig has been integrated into the DC/OS Universe, facilitating the deployment and monitoring of Docker containers and other formats on DC/OS, an open-source platform. This integration simplifies the process by allowing users to deploy the sysdig-agent container to each slave node through the DC/OS UI using a Sysdig Cloud API key, although deploying to the DC/OS or Mesos Master node still requires a manual step. The integration aims to enhance the ability to monitor sophisticated setups involving Mesos and Marathon components, and while automation for the master node deployment is not yet available, the process is straightforward with a single command for standard installations. This development is part of Sysdig's broader effort to offer robust monitoring solutions, as customers and community members increasingly utilize DC/OS for container management.

In a blog post by Loris Degioanni, Sysdig introduces SysdigBot, a tool designed to enhance integration between Slack and Sysdig Cloud by routing events from Slack directly into the monitoring system. SysdigBot allows users to send and correlate various IT events, such as code commits or support tickets, with metrics collected by Sysdig Cloud, thereby improving the efficiency of monitoring and incident response. This Python-based tool is customizable and can be easily deployed, offering universal event integration by leveraging the widespread use of Slack for communication. SysdigBot is presented as an innovative approach to integrating IT signals into a monitoring ecosystem, and its open-source nature provides an opportunity for further customization. Additionally, Sysdig highlights the potential for future enhancements in leveraging Slack for monitoring purposes.

Sysdig's Summer 2016 release introduces a variety of new features and integrations designed to enhance cloud and container monitoring capabilities. Key updates include improved container resource utilization metrics, which allow users to better understand CPU allocation, and expanded support for Apache Mesos, DC/OS, Kubernetes, and OpenShift, enabling more comprehensive monitoring of both physical and logical resources. The update also introduces advanced alerting features, such as multi-condition alerting and Slack notifications, as well as custom event support for better performance data correlation. Additionally, Sysdig has launched Sysdig Enterprise for on-premise monitoring and Sysdig Falco, an open-source behavioral activity monitoring agent with granular rule capabilities for containers, further expanding its suite of monitoring tools.