SUSE Combines StackState, Rancher for Kubernetes Observability

SUSE Linux is putting the staff and IP of a recent acquisition to work expediently. Following its June 2024 addition of full stack observability platform maker StackState, SUSE now has paved a fast path for developers to identify and solve problems within their containerized cloud-based environments with a new-gen observability platform.

As of Sept. 5, StackState is now integrated into SUSE’s Rancher Prime 3.1 premium container management service, designed to clarify and accelerate cloud-native observability for enterprise IT teams. The Luxembourg-based company claims that Rancher Prime now provides real-time, context-rich insight and streamlines troubleshooting processes, which enables IT teams to focus on innovation rather than managing crises.

Full-stack observability for an IT system refers to the ability to monitor and understand an entire system, from the underlying infrastructure to the application layer. It provides IT teams with a full view of their system’s health and performance, enabling them to quickly identify and resolve issues.

This includes monitoring metrics, logs, and traces from all components of the system, as well as the relationships and dependencies between them. Using full-stack observability, IT teams can proactively identify and prevent issues and improve system performance — with the result being better end-user experiences.

Not Just a ‘Toolbox for Observability’

“SUSE Observability doesn’t just provide a toolbox for observability — it delivers value to developers in under five minutes,” Andreas Prins, VP of Observability at SUSE, told The New Stack. “The installation comes with 28 pre-configured dashboards and over 40 monitors. These dashboards are interconnected, providing clear insights into what’s happening in your application, namespace, or cluster, even if the developer isn’t a Kubernetes expert.

“Additionally, the monitors detect issues out of the box as they arise in your environment. The advantage is that you don’t need extensive observability experience to catch many issues. Each monitor also includes a unique remediation guide, helping developers resolve problems efficiently.”

The company said that Rancher Prime with StackState offers several key high-level benefits:

• Strong cross-team collaboration: The platform fosters collaboration and innovation among teams by bringing all cloud native applications together in a single view.
• Application performance monitoring: Out-of-the-box eBPF-based visibility beyond the cluster, including components like databases, endpoints, applications, and queues.
• Automated data correlation: Rancher Prime now includes a powerful correlation engine that automatically connects metrics, events, logs, traces, and change information from various sources, creating a unified timeline that simplifies the identification of root causes and trends over time.
• Advanced dependency mapping: Automatically discover and visualize the relationships between services, applications, and infrastructure components, providing a holistic view of the IT environment. This feature helps pinpoint the exact timing and impact of changes, making troubleshooting faster and more accurate.
• Out-of-the-box connected dashboards: Centralize all observability data into user-friendly, out-of-the-box dashboards that offer real-time and historical insights. This eliminates the need for multiple tools and reduces context switching, significantly enhancing the efficiency of operations teams.

UI Extension Identifies Critical System Health Signals

What new elements or innovation is SUSE bringing to observability in this release? “This is the first release where both products start to integrate,” Prins said. “Rancher now has a UI extension that shows critical health signals directly in the interface. This gives platform engineers deep insights into the health of their workloads and allows them to quickly jump into SUSE Observability if something goes wrong.

“With this release, platform engineers can provide out-of-the-box observability to development teams for all Kubernetes clusters managed by Rancher. This will significantly improve the reliability of workloads. Additionally, it will reduce the troubleshooting burden on platform teams, as development and operations teams become more autonomous,” Prins said.

“Finally, Rancher users will experience a much faster MTTR (Mean Time To Repair or Mean Time To Resolution/Recovery/Restore) because all health signals are integrated into a single solution.”

Specifically, how does Kubernetes play in this release?

“Kubernetes plays a big role, as SUSE Observability is agnostic to different Kubernetes flavors,” Prins said. This means clusters running on the Google Kubernetes Engine, Amazon Kubernetes Service, or Rancher Kubernetes Engine “are managed through Rancher now gain full observability. Workloads running across clusters or even cloud providers can be captured from an observability perspective in a unified view. This allows customers running any Kubernetes flavor on any platform to have full control of their distributed environments through Rancher Prime,” he said.

End-to-end observability is highly significant for cloud-native applications due to the increasing complexity of IT environments. As enterprises adopt cloud and container technologies, traditional monitoring approaches become inadequate and updated approaches are needed, SUSE said.

Rancher Prime Observability is available now and at no additional cost to Rancher Prime customers, the company said.