Oracle has taken a step towards providing users with a better system understanding by introducing a Cloud Observability and Management Platform to its portfolio. And as multi-cloud doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon, the company isn’t stopping at its cloud’s edge but promises visibility “across any technology deployed in Oracle Cloud, third-party clouds, and on-premises systems.”
According to Oracle, its new platform brings together various analytics, diagnostics, and management services, aggregates observability data, and – probably to help it stand out from its various competitors – applies machine learning to find anomalous behaviour and predict issues.
Amongst the services used for that are established Oracle Cloud Infrastructure utilities such as Notifications, OS Management, and Streaming, as well as some new additions like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging. The latter has just been announced and grants customers a unified interface for log management built on open source projects such as the fluentd agent for log ingestion and version 1.0 of the CloudEvents standard.
It’s worth noting that this specific technology choice helps to make it easier to integrate with some much sought-after products in the cloud native space, which is something Oracle’s customers are surely interested in. And so the initial release comes decked out with out-of-the-box integrations for tools like collab app pusher Slack or dashboard dealer Grafana.
However, this isn’t the only enhancement compatible with the open source ecosystem, since Oracle also pushed its Cloud Infrastructure Application Performance Monitoring service into limited availability. The tool comes with functionality for end-user and server monitoring, as well as for the distributed tracing needed to keep on top of modern microservice architecture and is meant to be able to work with the CNCF’s OpenTracing and OpenMetrics frameworks.
Machine learning comes into play with the company’s Cloud Infrastructure Operations Insights, which analyses things like resource demand and uses the results to help users with capacity planning or identify problematic patterns.
To connect all services and move data between them, Oracle also put out a so-called Service Connector Hub. It can be accessed through the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console and for now only supports the moving of logs, though it has said it will support other data types in a future release.
As is the custom nowadays, the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform displays the information collected in dashboards, which are also said to include views for insight across the layers of the cloud system (think app, database, cloud environment etc). Additional details can be found on the Oracle blog.