SUSE Says Rancher Observability Is Better Than Pure Plays

SALT LAKE CITY — SUSE now offers what it describes as a comprehensive observability platform, designed to cover all environments — whether on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, on premises or in other environments — that run on Rancher for Kubernetes. With SUSE Cloud Observability, the company seeks to provide observability functionality comparable to that of industry heavyweights, including Datadog, Grafana and Honeycomb.

The release, launched at the KubeCon+CloudNativeCon event here, follows SUSE’s acquisition of StackState in June, which has enabled SUSE to extend StackState’s Kubernetes monitoring and analysis platform within its Rancher Kubernetes platform.

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Instead of opting for a standalone observability provider, SUSE Cloud Observability is touted as an all-encompassing platform for SUSE and Rancher environments — that previously required multiple tools for monitoring. Touted as an all-in-one platform that covers a wide range of observability across cloud environments, SUSE Cloud Observability’s capabilities are designed to extend from data ingestion and monitoring to dashboard creation and data visualization as part of Rancher-managed Kubernetes clusters.

This move is significant, as SUSE — one of the largest Kubernetes and platform providers by market share — is entering the observability market. It will be interesting to see whether SUSE extends its observability offerings beyond Rancher and chooses other environments for observability support — but there are no plans in place, SUSE executive told me.

“Our goal isn’t to become an independent observability provider but to extend our enterprise container management platform with observability. Our platform supports diverse Kubernetes environments, maintaining compatibility across ecosystems,” Andreas Prins, vice president of observability at SUSE, told me. “If you’re running Rancher, for instance, it will seamlessly observe OpenShift clusters or even vanilla Kubernetes. We’re committed to maintaining this flexibility across platforms.”

New Trend?

This initiative coincides with the broader trend of merging observability and security into unified platforms, a shift that is also being seen from other providers like Red Hat and VMware. These providers are increasingly integrating with existing observability solutions, from OpenTelemetry to partnerships with the largest observability platforms. With its new observability brand, SUSE is taking this approach even further. Whether they can achieve this level of comprehensive observability support remains to be seen, of course — but the demo I saw shows potential for Rancher Kubernetes.

Indeed, what makes this observability solution unique is that instead of integrating multiple external systems, it’s designed as an integrated part of the Rancher platform. Of course, it’s not exclusive — users can still use their favorite platforms or Grafana panels should they choose to — while SUSE now offers observability as a native component within Rancher. This means users get functionalities that directly align with the Rancher environment.

“The other Kubernetes players might claim they have similar tools, but they don’t take the same integrated approach that we do. In contrast, we’re not positioning this as a standalone observability unit or trying to compete directly against dedicated observability solutions like Datadog or others,” Peter Smails, general manager of enterprise container management, SUSE, told me at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon. “Rather, we’re enhancing the Rancher platform with built-in observability. This approach brings value by keeping observability within the platform ecosystem.”

Function, Function

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The range of functionality and compatibility that SUSE’s observability offers invariably makes use of more recent advances in observability that eBPF and OpenTelemetry, which offers a standardized process for telemetry data gathering and other benefits while solving issues require robust, tailored observability solutions that go beyond simple OpenTelemetry, of course.

On offer with SUSE Cloud Observability that SUSE communicated include:

• Visibility into clusters, with automated service dependency mapping and over 40 dashboards designed to streamline monitoring and troubleshooting.
• A pay-as-you-go model that can scale up or down.
• Integrated alerting via Slack, PagerDuty and OpsGenie.

One of the more interesting Kubernetes-specific features is how SUSE Cloud Observability offers a snapshotting capability extending across metrics, traces and logs. Imagine you have a question regarding metrics. “When you think of metrics, they are essentially time series data. Events happen over time and you might have a limited timeline of these events. For instance, let’s look at the past 12 hours,” Prins said. “Events like changes and other information about modifications are tracked over time. If we return to topology, we can see when issues arise and even identify when the environment was last in a healthy state.”

The system captures all traffic across the landscape, tracking interactions down to the process level and highlighting issues at a high level to facilitate understanding, Prins said. For example, monitors signal when issues arise. In the demo, an issue can be seen starting at a specific time and the playbook provides a step-by-step guide to resolve it. This includes identifying when components were healthy, when failures began and which metrics, such as the span error ratio, confirm the issue, Prins said.

“Few players in the field can take a complete snapshot of system state, dependencies and dependency health over time. Since components often appear and disappear, many systems struggle to track these fluctuations,” Prins said. “This process is simplified here. For instance, if a pod spins up, causes a disruption and then spins down, the sequence of events during that incident remains available. Even with inactive pods, information is preserved, enabling future mitigation of similar issues.”

Playbooks are generated with AI, providing structured data without requiring extensive manual intervention. More than 48 policies are available, each with both validation and resolution methods tailored for various issues, ensuring a guided process. Components affected across different teams and technologies are visible. The playbook follows each step, pre-filtering traces and minimizing distractions to maintain focus on the root cause of the issue, Prins said.

SUSE Cloud Observability also underscores the criticality of observability, as well as security, and for Kubernetes, both are especially critical. “Here’s where it gets interesting: with security and observability, there are potential use cases where these fields could intersect. How can observability be leveraged across an entire portfolio?” Smails said. “How could it support future storage needs and in what ways could observability be applied with user virtualization? These are some examples of the expanding use cases that allow for observability to be leveraged even further.”