Highlight reel: 5 takeaways from Oracle’s observability and management platform event
Lesson one: Help is here for the people who run applications in multicloud environments.
by Jeff Erickson | October 2020
System administrators want to keep applications running smoothly by catching problems early and fixing them before anyone notices. To do this in today’s complex multi- and hybrid-cloud environments, they juggle an average of 30 different monitoring and management tools, and yet they still often find out an application is having problems only after users complain. Now Oracle has taken on this problem, announcing Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform—a new set of management, diagnostic, and analytics services. See what Oracle is offering, which partners are on board, what the press is saying, and how the product team answered tough questions from attendees.
Why Oracle. Why now.
This isn’t just a cloud story. Oracle drew on its product experts across the stack—from cloud infrastructure and apps, to database and data management, to on-premises systems and multicloud environments. The result gives IT teams visibility “for all layers of the IT stack, whether customers’ apps are deployed on Oracle Cloud, Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, on-premises, or in other public clouds,” said Clay Magouyrk, Oracle executive vice president of cloud infrastructure. “We are eliminating the complexity and reducing the risks and costs associated with today’s multitool approach.”
Plays well with others
Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform helps mitigate vendor lock-in by making it easier to run multicloud environments. And it lets customers leverage their existing investments in technologies, such as Grafana, Slack, Twilio, and PagerDuty, that provide monitoring, logging, messaging, and incident management. Grafana, for example, is an open source observability dashboard. Grafana CTO Anthony Woods announced two Grafana-certified plugins for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
‘Much needed,’ say press and analysts
Journalists and analysts familiar with this growing need in hybrid- and multicloud environments were quick to grasp the importance of the Oracle story, including articles in ZDNet, SiliconANGLE, CRN, DevOps, and ITProPortal. Here’s ESG Principal Analyst Mark Peters: “The newly launched Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform is a pretty sexy answer to this long-term vexing issue. It gives organizations a level of ‘arms wrapped around everything’ control, based upon its single source of truth and comprehensive visibility.”
Bring on your questions
Attendees got to pepper product managers with questions, via Zoom of course, about product functionality. One big theme was how comprehensive it really is. Oracle’s Dan Koloski, vice president of product management for enterprise and cloud manageability, stressed that it’s about visibility “from end user to disk,” and that it covers much more than Oracle products. “Log metric and trace tools are all unified, so there’s a single set of telemetry,” Koloski said. “It covers hybrid, on-premises, and multicloud. This is not just about observability and monitoring for Oracle.”
Customers tell the story
The goal of the new platform is to help customers maximize the performance and availability of critical applications, and that’s precisely what customers described: “Oracle provides us with an integrated observability platform for our applications, traces, and logs,” said Peter Gawroniak, senior director global infrastructure, Integra LifeSciences. “Since moving from our previous cloud provider, the time taken to diagnose and resolve problems has improved by five times.”
Dig deeper
- Read Clay Magouyrk’s blog post: Announcing the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform
- Read the comprehensive Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform press release
Photography: Oracle
Illustration: Wes Rowell
