Oracle Cloud: One-click instrumentation & observability is now a thing
Oracle is all about data, obviously.
But the Oracle of this decade (and recent history) is more specifically all about data and information observability, autonomous control, analytics, diagnostics and we might just pepper in a double observability for good measure i.e. this is a company on a mission to cut through the risk of fragmented observance across what are increasingly complex multi-cloud environments.
Larry ‘did I tell you about my sailing career’ Ellison’s words are still ringing in our ears from the last time we attended Oracle Open World (Ed – ah yes, 2019)… during which the Oracle CTO and co-founder described how his firm had engineered a substantial proportion of autonomous intelligence into its core database offering (to perform everything from system patches to upgrades & maintenance and onwards to data preparation) and platform.
So what of Oracle 2020 in a year when (of course) the organisation’s main customer/user event has had to switch to virtual?
The company’s news this month sees it talk about the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform.
Quite a mouthful, but one designed to explain the ‘bringing together’ of a set of management, diagnostic and analytics services to help eliminate the complexity, risk, and cost associated with today’s fragmented approach for managing multi-cloud work zones, spanning public, hybrid and on-premises environments as they do.
A unified view, just for you
Part of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) suite of services, OCI itself claims to provide a unified view across an entire software stack.
“It enables easy diagnostics of cloud-native and traditional technologies deployed in the cloud or on-premises. With built-in machine learning, it automatically detects anomalies and enables quick remediation in near-real time. The platform has adopted an open, standards-based approach that is vendor-agnostic, supporting ecosystem interoperability out-of-the-box with Slack, Grafana, Twilio, PagerDuty and others,” notes Oracle, in a press statement.
Ellison and co contend that cloud environment complexity has grown, but monitoring and management tooling has generally not kept pace with that same complexity curve.
Wait for the payoff – yep – Oracle OCI with the new function actually DOES keep up, right?
Yes, that’s pretty much what the firm is saying, especially in light of the rise of a growing number of emerging technologies such as Kubernetes, containers, converged databases and microservices.
Instead of a collection of siloed and fragmented tools, the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform promises to provide a connected solution comprised of related services.
What’s in the box?
This includes the newly announced Logging, Logging Analytics, Database Management, Application Performance Monitoring, Operations Insights and Service Connector Hub services, as well as existing services such as Monitoring, Notifications, Events, Functions, Streaming and OS Management.
“Oracle has deep domain expertise in operating the largest portfolio of SaaS and enterprise application environments. We also manage the largest and most critical datasets for our customers, and we develop and operate on-premises infrastructure, unlike other cloud providers,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Magouyrk insists that Oracle is eliminating the complexity and reducing the risks and costs associated with today’s multi-tool approach to make the overall management process more intuitive and cost-effective.
The integrated platform aggregates all observability data for holistic analysis and applies operations-optimised ML algorithms that can identify anomalous system behaviour, rapidly isolate and remediate performance problems and prevent outages by providing accurate forecasting of impending issues.
This information is delivered in out-of-the-box and customer-designed dashboards with cross-tier views that provide complete visibility across applications, databases, infrastructure and cloud environments.
One-click instrumentation & observability is now a thing, get used to the term.
Image source: Oracle