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Oracle Launches Cloud Observability and Management Platform

Everybody seems to be catching the observability wave, and the folks at Redwood Shores are hanging ten with their launch last week of the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform. The new platform is designed to provide a comprehensive set of management, diagnostic, and analytics services to help customers manage multicloud and on-premises deployments.

The new observability platform, available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), is a suite of services that provides a unified view across the entire software stack. The platform aggregates all observability data for holistic analysis and applies operations-optimized machine learning (ML) algorithms that can identify anomalous system behavior, rapidly isolate and remediate performance problems, and prevent outages by providing accurate forecasting of impending issues, the company says. This information is delivered in "out-of-the-box and customer-designed dashboards" with cross-tier views that provide complete visibility across applications, databases, infrastructure, and cloud environments. And it provides one-click instrumentation of all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources, and visibility across any technology deployed in Oracle Cloud, third-party clouds, and on-premises systems.

Oracle has adopted an open, standards-based approach with this platform that is vendor-agnostic, the company says. It supports ecosystem interoperability out-of-the-box with Slack, Grafana, Twilio, PagerDuty, among other solutions. Oracle's list of early customers includes Integra LifeSciences, Lone Star College, Kingold, and Green, along with implementation partners such as Wipro, Capgemini, and Mythics.

"Oracle has deep domain expertise in operating the largest portfolio of SaaS and enterprise application environments, said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure group, in a statement. "We also manage the largest and most critical datasets for our customers, and we develop and operate on-premises infrastructure, unlike other cloud providers. We are combining decades of experience with OCI to provide end-to-end 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, we are eliminating the complexity and reducing the risks and costs associated with today's multi-tool approach to make the overall management process highly intuitive and cost-effective."

"Observability" comes from the field of engineering. It's defined as the ability to infer the internal states of a system based on its outputs. In IT, it's the practice of instrumenting systems and applications to collect log data, metrics, and traces to provide actionable insights into what's going on in a system.

This year has seen a plethora of observability announcements, RedMonk analyst James Governor noted in an earlier statement.

"Observability is making the transition from being a niche concern to a mainstream approach for user experience, systems and service management in startups, SaaS, and enterprise companies," Governor said. "Change rather than stability is the goal, and there is a lot more uncertainty in systems and applications than there used to be."

Posted by John K. Waters on October 13, 2020