At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 last week, Observe, Inc. launched Kubernetes Explorer, an addition to the company’s observability platform that promises to simplify visualizing and troubleshooting for cloud native environments.
With the new, purpose-built Observability experience, DevOps teams, SREs, and engineers can get a big-picture view of compounding Kubernetes (K8s) environments, enabling them to faster and more easily identify and resolve anomalies in health and performance.
A Welcome Addition for the K8s Boom
K8s adoption has been on a fast streak in recent years, largely driven by new trends in edge computing and exploding AI/ML workloads. Looking ahead, experts expect this bounding growth to only continue; in fact, a recent report from Gartner predicts that more than 75% of all AI deployments will “use container technology as the underlying compute environment” by 2027. That’s more than a 25% increase from today.
As K8s adoption continues to grow, so does the complexity of managing K8s environments. This translates to greater challenges for DevOps teams, SREs, and engineers as they try to maintain visibility across the K8s platform and cloud-native infrastructure, observe distributed applications, and glean actionable insights into the health and performance of K8s-deployed workloads. The bigger picture is that the increasing complexity of K8s-deployed distributed applications has become a stubborn obstacle that threatens to stall further container adoption.
But Observe is promising to change the status quo. With Kubernetes Explorer, the SaaS observability company offers something different than traditional monitoring tools, giving engineers, for the first time, a visual, unified interface for K8s.
At Last, a Monitoring Tools that Shows the Bigger Picture
Kubernetes Explorer unifies fragmented data across metrics, traces, and logs to deliver contextual insights that span applications, the K8s platform, and cloud-native infrastructure. In turn, Observe says this heightened visibility will enable DevOps teams, SREs, and engineers to better understand disparate K8s components so they can identify, diagnose, and rectify issues faster and more easily than before.
Notably, Kubernetes Explorer integrates with Observe’s AI Investigator, a part of its “Project Voyager” product update announced in September 2024 alongside the company’s $145 million Series B funding. Connected with this agentic AI approach, Kubernetes Explorer can create custom, incident-specific visualizations, acting as a de-facto K8s assistant to support on-call engineers’ troubleshooting efforts. Other features include Kubernetes Hindsight, to provide historical visibility, Resource Descriptors to give visibility into full YAML configuration of K8s resources, and Cluster Optimization to deliver a visual map of workload distribution across the K8s cluster.
Altogether, this could be a big win for engineering and DevOps teams whose traditional monitoring tools have failed to give a comprehensive view of application performance.
According to Jeremy Burton, CEO of Observe, most other tools that monitor K8s-deployed applications and infrastructure offer only limited historical context; in other words, while they can provide teams with insights into the current state of K8s deployments, they lack the depth greater historical visibility allows. “This makes it difficult for teams to diagnose and resolve issues effectively,” he explains. Plus, typical monitoring tools often struggle to integrate fragmented data types (e.g., metrics, traces, and logs), further inhibiting teams’ abilities to sufficiently surveil applications and troubleshoot issues in health and performance.
In contrast, Kubernetes Explorer efficiently brings together siloed data across metrics, traces, and logs to provide full visibility into all K8s components, both currently running and previously terminated, making it easier for teams to understand the interdependencies of components so they can detect, diagnose, and resolve issues much more quickly — even retrospectively. AI Investigator can then jump in with suggestions for troubleshooting. With Kubernetes Explorer feeding the Kubernetes AI agent artifacts (like custom visualizations, OPAL, and telemetry data), it enables the agent to reason through, determine root causes, and offer resolution suggestions.
One Step in Visibility, a Huge Leap for Industry
With AI capabilities and automated visualization, Kubernetes Explorer promises to bring some much-needed simplicity to the chaotic K8s terrain — or in Burton’s words, it will “cut through the complexity of Kubernetes.”
Given the fast-growing adoption of K8s and the advancing complexity of K8s and cloud native environments, it makes sense that Burton calls Observe’s new addition “a leap forward in observability for cloud native environments.” He also names Observe’s agentic AI approach to K8s troubleshooting as “unique” in the industry and affirms it’s the only tool that can tackle the woes of DevOps teams, SREs, and engineers who have long struggled to effectively monitor K8s-deployed applications: “Engineers need actionable insights [that are] unavailable with current observability offerings.”
To deliver these insights, Observe says they’re making it easy. As part of the company’s mission to provide comprehensive observability solutions without hidden fees, Kubernetes Explorer is now available to all Observe customers at no additional cost.
The post Observe Simplifies K8s Troubleshooting With Kubernetes Explorer appeared first on The New Stack.
New Observability experience enhances visibility and visualization for faster, better troubleshooting.