Mike Cohen, Splunk | Leading with Observability

Mike Cohen, Head of Product Management, Network Monitoring, Splunk sits down with John Furrier for a special CUBE Conversation on Leading with Observability. In this episode of the series, Mike discusses network observability for distributed services.

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https://siliconangle.com/2021/02/22/splunk-clears-complexity-fog-bring-observability-cloud-device-cubeconversations-observability/

Splunk clears the ‘complexity fog’ to bring observability from cloud to device
BY BETSY AMY-VOGT

Achieving network observability for distributed services
The network is a common scapegoat for public cloud problems thanks to the increasing opacity of network infrastructure in the cloud. While the network is sometimes to blame, equally as often there’s another cause for the issue.

“You need to understand where these problems are occurring to have the right level of visibility in your systems,” said Cohen during a CUBE Conversation that gets into the nitty-gritty of observability at the network level.

Rather than the culprit for outages, the network is “an untapped resource” for site reliability engineers struggling to understand the complex environments created by distributed systems, according to Cohen. Next-level network performance monitoring technologies, such as extended Berkeley Packet Filter, stylized as eBPF, and OS-level monitoring are giving visibility into how processes and containers communicate.

“Network is a powerful new data set that we can combine with other aspects of what people have already been doing in observability,” Cohen stated.

eBPF (which is integrated into the Linux operating system) gives the ability to visualize and optimize a service architecture. This is a huge step toward clarifying the complexities of distributed systems.

“It gives you an interesting touchpoint to observe the behavior of every processing container automatically,” Cohen said. “You can see with very little overhead what they’re doing and correlate that with data from systems like Kubernetes to understand how distributed systems behave [and] to see how things connect to two other things.”

The Splunk Observability Suite takes this to another level, automatically building a complete service map of the system in seconds without developer input, according to Cohen.

“Without forcing anyone to change their code, they can get visibility across an entire system automatically,” he said.

This visibility enables not only proactive problem identification and resolution, but the ability to optimize the system and lower costs. Which turns the network “from a liability to a strength in these distributed environments,” Cohen stated.

Gartner’s “Innovation Insight for Observability” report outlines the importance of true end-to-end visibility and recommendations for achieving it. The report’s findings underscore the importance of an open-source solution and approach, applying pragmatic observability to digital business, and increasing application uptime by design.

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