Chronosphere | Cloud-Native Monitoring at Scale | Summary and Q&A

TL;DR

Chronosphere, a cloud native monitoring solution built on M3, addresses the scalability, reliability, and flexibility challenges faced by businesses in the cloud native ecosystem.

Key Insights

• 😶‍🌫️ The shift to cloud native architectures has created a need for more scalable, reliable, and flexible monitoring solutions.
• 😶‍🌫️ Existing monitoring tools are not designed to handle the scale and requirements of cloud native environments, resulting in increased costs and limitations.
• 🤗 Chronosphere offers a scalable, reliable, and flexible monitoring solution built on M3 that addresses these challenges and leverages the open source Prometheus ecosystem.
• 🧑‍💻 Companies from various sectors, including tech startups and traditional enterprises, have benefited from using Chronosphere.

Transcript

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Questions & Answers

Q: What are the key challenges faced by businesses in the cloud native ecosystem?

Businesses in the cloud native ecosystem face challenges related to the scalability, reliability, and flexibility of their monitoring solutions. The increasing volume of monitoring data, the need for multi-region and multi-cloud monitoring, and the high costs of existing solutions are some of the key issues faced.

Q: How does Chronosphere address these challenges?

Chronosphere offers a cloud native monitoring solution built on M3, which provides scalability, reliability, and flexibility. It can handle large amounts of monitoring data, replicate data across multiple regions and cloud providers, and allows for custom data policies based on specific use cases, optimizing costs.

Q: How does Chronosphere leverage the open source Prometheus ecosystem?

Chronosphere enables businesses to leverage the open source Prometheus ecosystem by offering compatibility with the Prometheus format, allowing the ingestion of Prometheus metrics. Users can continue using Prometheus query language (PromQL) and import existing Grafana dashboards and Prometheus alert manager definitions.

Q: Can you provide examples of companies that have benefited from using Chronosphere?

One example is Tecton, a machine learning startup that started with Prometheus and Grafana but faced limitations in scalability and reliability. After transitioning to Chronosphere, they achieved a more reliable solution and greater control over costs. Another example is a large delivery app company that experienced scalability and cost issues with their existing cloud-hosted monitoring solution. They switched to Chronosphere for a more reliable and cost-effective solution.

Summary

In this video, Rob Skillington and Martin Mao, co-founders at Chronosphere, discuss the challenges and requirements of cloud-native monitoring. They introduce Chronosphere as a truly cloud-native monitoring solution built on top of M3, an open-source horizontally scalable distributed time series database. They talk about the shift from on-premise data centers to cloud-native stacks and how the rise of Kubernetes, microservices, and serverless has changed the way applications are built and monitored. They also highlight the limitations of existing monitoring tools and explain why Prometheus alone is not enough for a truly cloud-native monitoring solution. Finally, they discuss the cost, scalability, reliability, and flexibility aspects of cloud-native monitoring and how Chronosphere addresses these challenges.

Questions & Answers

Q: Can you introduce yourselves and explain your background and how you came to start Chronosphere?

Martin Mao, co-founder and CEO of Chronosphere, has a background in managing development and SRE teams at Uber and AWS. Rob Skillington, co-founder and CTO of Chronosphere, has experience in infrastructure development and worked on building M3 at Uber.

Q: How did you and Martin start working together?

Rob and Martin worked together at Microsoft on Office 365 and have known each other for a long time. They also worked together at Uber, where they built M3, the foundation of Chronosphere.

Q: What is the technology you built at Uber called M3?

M3 is an open-source horizontally scalable distributed time series database. It is designed to handle the scalability, reliability, and flexibility requirements of cloud-native monitoring.

Q: How has the cloud-native landscape changed in the past few years?

The shift to cloud-native has led to the adoption of microservices and container-based infrastructure like Kubernetes. New companies are starting with a microservices-oriented architecture, and existing companies are shifting their infrastructure in the same direction. This architecture brings many advantages but also requires monitoring tools that are scalable, reliable, and tailored for the cloud-native ecosystem.

Q: What are the limitations of existing monitoring tools in the cloud-native world?

Existing monitoring tools were not built for the scale and volume of data produced in cloud-native environments. They are not scalable, reliable, or flexible enough to handle the monitoring requirements of cloud-native applications. Additionally, the cost of monitoring can skyrocket in cloud-native environments, and existing tools do not provide the necessary control over costs.

Q: How does Chronosphere address the limitations of existing monitoring tools?

Chronosphere provides a truly cloud-native monitoring solution built on top of M3. It is designed to handle the scale, reliability, and flexibility requirements of cloud-native monitoring. It offers an economically efficient solution and leverages streaming metrics aggregation to optimize data storage and control costs. Chronosphere also provides features for handling organizational complexity and allows users to leverage open-source ecosystem tools like Prometheus and Grafana.

Q: Why is Prometheus not enough for a cloud-native monitoring solution?

While Prometheus is a popular choice for monitoring in cloud-native environments, it has limitations in terms of scalability and complexity management. As applications and infrastructure grow, the cardinality and volume of metrics overwhelm a single Prometheus instance. Additionally, the management and configuration of Prometheus can become difficult and costly. Chronosphere builds on top of Prometheus and provides a more scalable and user-friendly solution.

Q: How does Chronosphere differ from other technologies like data lakes or data warehouses?

The real-time nature of monitoring data sets it apart from other data types. Technologies like data lakes or data warehouses are not designed to handle the speed and real-time requirements of monitoring data. They lack the ability to perform real-time analysis and provide the necessary insights for monitoring and observability. Chronosphere focuses on providing real-time monitoring capabilities and is specifically built for cloud-native environments.

Q: How does Chronosphere handle scale, reliability, and flexibility in cloud-native monitoring?

Chronosphere is designed to handle the scale of data produced in a cloud-native environment and provides a cost-efficient solution. It ensures reliability by replicating data across multiple availability zones and regions, allowing for high levels of availability and fault tolerance. With regards to flexibility, Chronosphere allows users to customize data storage and aggregation based on their specific use cases, providing the ability to store and query data at different levels of detail and granularity.

Q: What are some of the features and functionalities offered by Chronosphere?

In addition to its core monitoring capabilities, Chronosphere provides features for handling organizational complexity. It helps teams organize their monitoring data, dashboards, alerts, and permissions based on services or teams. Chronosphere also offers integration with existing open-source tools and standards, allowing users to leverage their existing instrumentation and monitoring infrastructure.

Q: How does Chronosphere compare in terms of cost and scalability to other monitoring solutions in the market?

Chronosphere is about 10 times cheaper than many other monitoring solutions in the market. It offers an economically efficient solution that scales effectively to handle the increasing volume of monitoring data in cloud-native environments. Chronosphere's pricing model and features allow organizations to have control over their monitoring costs while ensuring scalability and reliability.

Takeaways

Cloud-native monitoring is essential for the modern cloud-native stack. Existing monitoring tools were not built to handle the scale, reliability, and flexibility requirements of cloud-native environments. Chronosphere, built on top of M3, provides a truly cloud-native monitoring solution that addresses these challenges. It offers scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency, allowing organizations to monitor their cloud-native environments effectively. By leveraging open-source standards and providing additional features for managing organizational complexity, Chronosphere simplifies the monitoring process and empowers users to gain valuable insights from their cloud-native applications.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• Chronosphere is a cloud native monitoring solution built on M3, developed by the co-founders who previously worked together at Uber on infrastructure and observability.

• The shift to cloud native architectures running on container-based infrastructure like Kubernetes has created the need for more scalable, reliable, and flexible monitoring solutions.

• Existing monitoring tools are not designed to handle the scale and requirements of cloud native environments, resulting in increased costs and limitations in data retention and reliability.

• Chronosphere addresses these challenges by offering a scalable, reliable, and flexible monitoring solution that leverages the open source Prometheus ecosystem and provides cost-effective cloud native monitoring.