Original source: dbta.com. This article summarizes the Circonus Spring 2020 release announcement.
Overview
Circonus, the provider of a machine data intelligence platform, announced its Spring 2020 release in April 2020. The update spans several major capability areas: a dedicated Kubernetes monitoring solution, multi-cloud metric collection, availability of the IRONdb time-series database on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace, enhanced Terraform integration, and a refreshed user interface.
The stated goal of the release is to allow engineering teams to collect and analyze IT infrastructure, application, and container data at scale—across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployments—within a single platform.
Kubernetes Monitoring
The new Kubernetes monitoring solution is designed to give operations teams turnkey visibility into one or more Kubernetes clusters. Key capabilities include:
- Health-based alerting: Alerts are tied to cluster and workload health status rather than only raw metric thresholds, reducing alert noise and surfacing actionable signals.
- Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) integration: Circonus can drive dynamic HPA strategies, allowing teams to define custom scaling logic based on the organization’s unique workload patterns rather than relying solely on default CPU or memory metrics.
- Turnkey dashboards: Pre-built dashboards provide immediate visibility into cluster performance without requiring teams to build visualizations from scratch.
Multi-Cloud Monitoring
Circonus’s cloud monitoring solution introduces a lightweight cloud agent that collects metrics from the three major public cloud providers:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Metrics from all connected cloud accounts are consolidated into a single platform. Teams can then run queries, configure alerts, and compare performance data across providers from one interface rather than context-switching between each cloud’s native monitoring tooling. In-application dashboards are also included to reduce time-to-insight for cross-cloud environments.
IRONdb on the GCP Marketplace
Circonus’s IRONdb time-series database is now available through the GCP Marketplace. This listing allows customers to deploy and operate their own IRONdb instances inside their private GCP environments, which may be important for organizations with data residency or compliance requirements.
Customers using the Marketplace deployment retain access to the Circonus SaaS UI. The GCP Marketplace listing also introduces an unmetered metric ingestion pricing model, which can simplify cost forecasting for teams with high or variable metric volumes.
Application Performance Analytics and Terraform Integration
This release adds the ability to run analytic queries across thousands of application metrics in near real time, improving visibility into application performance without requiring teams to pre-aggregate or downsample data before querying.
Terraform integration has been expanded to offer more comprehensive infrastructure-as-code management of Circonus resources, enabling teams to version-control dashboards, alerts, and other platform configuration alongside the infrastructure they monitor.
Cluster Broker and UI Improvements
On the reliability side, the Circonus cluster broker is designed to distribute metric ingestion load across multiple brokers. If one broker fails, the others continue processing, reducing the risk of a monitoring blind spot during an infrastructure incident.
The platform UI has received a refresh that includes:
- Dark mode for reduced eye strain in low-light environments.
- Responsive design that adapts the interface for use on mobile devices, useful for on-call engineers needing to triage issues away from a workstation.
Platform Positioning
Bob Moul, CEO of Circonus, summarized the platform’s design goals at the time of the announcement:
“Unlike traditional monitoring tools, the Circonus machine data intelligence platform was purpose-built to offer unlimited scalability. It can ingest, store, and analyze trillions of measurements a second in real-time across billions of individual metric streams. This allows today’s enterprises to gain levels of valuable insights that were previously untapped, allowing them to improve the performance of their IT infrastructure, prevent issues before they arise, optimize processes, and make better business decisions.”
Bob Moul, CEO, Circonus
The Spring 2020 release reflects a broader industry trend of monitoring platforms consolidating multi-cloud, container, and on-premises telemetry into a single plane of glass, reducing the operational overhead of managing disparate observability tools per environment.