April and May have been productive months for ContainIQ, a Kubernetes monitoring, and observability platform. Our engineering team worked to polish and improve existing features; including important updates to our Request Tracer and Logging dashboards.
Highlights:
- Request Tracer: additional protocol support added including MySQL and Postgres
- Request Tracer: advanced filtering by protocol, method, status codes, and more
- Log visualization
- Log alerting and monitors
- Improved UX/UI for alerting and monitors
Request Tracer: Additional Protocol Support
In addition to HTTP, our tracing feature set now supports additional protocols. Users can now trace MySQL and Postgres queries.
In the coming weeks, and during the current sprint, we will be adding additional protocol support including gRPC.
Request Tracer: Advanced Filtering (Trace Query Builder)
Users can now build advanced trace queries directly from the dashboard. In addition to allowing users to search by both path and pod names, individually or with regex, users can filter traces by protocol (HTTP, MySQL, Postgres), method (GET, POST, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, PUT), status code, and latency.
Log Visualization
As our customers' log ingest started to ramp up, it became imperative to visualize this and help them understand their log ingestion over various periods of time. This particular feature is becoming extremely important as a remediation tool, as it helps our customers identify points in time where log ingest spikes (or drops), leading to a faster remediation cycle, as they can pinpoint the exact time and service that they should focus on troubleshooting.
To hone in on a specific spike (or drop) in logs, simply click and drag over the specified timeframe on the graph and release, this will return all logs from that particular point in time.
Log Monitors and Alerts
In addition to Event and Metric alerts, we’ve expanded our feature set to now support Log alerts. Users can set rules based on any log that is ingested inside their cluster, including all internal applications and Kubernetes system components.
Users can take advantage of value-based log alerts, making it easier to distinguish between normal activity and spikes in log ingest that should be monitored closely. Creating a Log monitor is a straightforward 2-step process; Add your message query followed by trigger conditions that need to be met.
Alerts can be fed directly to the same Slack channels used for Event and Metric alerts, or, users can choose to feed to create new channels to use specifically for Log alerts.
Improved UX/UI For Alerting and Monitors
As we expanded the capabilities of our alerting feature set we also worked to clean up and update the UX/UI. Our main goal was to create a more seamless experience. Previously, users had to navigate to another panel to create a monitor and this was interrupting workflow and wasting time. Instead, we implemented “Create a Monitor” as a modal that overlays the current dashboard they are working off. We also cleaned up the UI and simplified the process of creating monitors across all alert types.
That’s it for our May update. We are working on some exciting things in June, looking forward to sharing them with you very soon! Here is a sneak preview of a few of the items we are working on now for release in the next month:
- Additional protocol support including gRPC
- Updated Logging UI
- Payload data visualization
- ContainIQ Profiler
- Improved on-boarding flow
- Daily and Weekly Email Summaries
If you want to learn more about our latest releases or how ContainIQ can help you with your monitoring and observability needs, feel free to book a demo here. You can also sign up for an account and get started today with our self-service product here.
As always, we welcome any suggestions, comments, and feedback. Please feel free to reach out. We’d love to hear from you!
