Geneos embraces OpenTelemetry for complete observability
“There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear…” as Buffalo Springfield once said.
That statement reflects just how problematic it can be to understand your IT environment when something goes wrong. You can see what is happening from the data you monitor and collect. But, until now, it was difficult to understand why it is happening.
Now, with an OpenTelemetry plugin, Geneos 6.0.0 gives you that ability. Financial services companies are keen to standardize instrumentation using the open, vendor neutral standard OpenTelemetry. So much so that analysts say it is emerging as the de facto standard for instrumenting distributed traces, metrics and logs.
With the new OpenTelemetry plugin for collecting metrics, logs, and traces (partially supported), you have full-stack monitoring of your systems and applications - alongside your other monitoring.
Benefits for Geneos users
With the increased use of highly distributed microservice architectures, OpenTelemetry has become popular for instrumenting applications that collect observability data. This means application developers can spend less time and effort building instrumentation tied to any vendor or data collection technology and more time on building new features.
Centrally manage Collection Agent configuration
In addition to the OpenTelemetry plugin, Geneos 6.0.0 has improved visibility and management of Collection Agent and its plugins, first introduced in Geneos 5.x, to gather data points (metrics, logs, and events) and report them to Geneos Netprobe. Collection Agent configuration can now be managed centrally in Gateway via the Gateway Setup Editor alongside your other Geneos configuration. This removes the need to manage YAML files on the host where Collection Agent is running, making it easier to manage configuration. Support for variables and validation reduces complexity and improves user experience.
Easily migrate AES keys
Now users can also easily migrate AES keys for more secure password management. Because there is an increased focus on security, these keys must be changed regularly – a time-consuming task when done manually. Our Gateway Setup Editor now supports a migration option to easily update the configuration to use the new key. It now takes you days instead of weeks of time and resources to configure what can be hundreds of gateways.
Continued support for Geneos 5.x
ITRS will continue to support Geneos 5.x at least until the end of 2024 because we recognise that not everyone will be able to upgrade to Geneos 6.x immediately. Currently, we have not set an end-of-life date for Geneos 5.x versions. Geneos 4.x.x end-of-life date is set for 31 May 2023.
What’s coming up in 3-6 months?
Focus on Kubernetes:
- Ability to monitor the Kubernetes control plane components (API Server, Control Manager, Scheduler, etc) alongside the cluster and application health.
- Updated Prometheus plugin to support Kubernetes target scraping. This means you can collect metrics from any application instrumented to expose Prometheus metrics (in Prometheus Exposition Format) directly without the Prometheus Server being installed.
- Fluentd is a popular log collection tool in Kubernetes deployments, similar to what Prometheus is for metric collection. We want to introduce a new Fluentd plugin to collect log events if Fluentd is your choice for log aggregation.
- Support for cloud Kubernetes platforms like AWS EKS and Azure AKS, configuration templates to get started quickly and better documentation overall.
New JDBC plugin: Many databases and data platforms support JDBC connectivity to access the data. A JDBC plugin for Geneos would allow easy integration with wide range of databases.
New Google Cloud Platform (GCP): Adding to the existing Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure monitoring capabilities, we want to build similar capabilities to monitor the Google Cloud platform.
Puppet and Ansible deployment templates: Puppet and Ansible are popular tools for managing software deployments at scale. We want to provide templates that allow you to deploy and maintain Netprobes at scale.
Centralised Gateway Configuration in ITRS Obcerv: Manage your Gateway configurations in the Obcerv platform. This is a feature of the Gateway Hub, being ported across to Obcerv. You can read the entire release note by clicking below.
