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Observability

Observations: Need real-time analytics? There’s a StarTree Cloud for that

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Led by former LinkedIn and Uber hands, Mountain View, California-based Star Tree looks to drive wider use of real-time analytical applications based around the Apache Pinot OLAP engine. This kind of technology has many uses in a world where great volumes of data arrive at ultrahigh velocity.

TECHNOLOGY EMPLOYED
If “OLAP” had marketing magic, that was a long time ago. OLAP was an early attempt to go beyond relational database and data warehouse limitations, but Apache Pinot today is probably better described in today’s parlance as a column-oriented data store, and its competition can come from any of the many databases to arise in recent years. Apache Pinot is designed to handle fast ingestion of data, and fast joins on users’ SQL queries. Since the StarTree focus is on cloud computing — its found in the three big cloud providers’ marketplaces – it can and also has been called a Database As A Service (DBaaS). [Read more…] about Observations: Need real-time analytics? There’s a StarTree Cloud for that

At Dynatrace Perform 2025: Non-breaking break points make their point

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Live Debugger captures key performance data as working code does its work — Giving developers a real-time view into issues.

By Jack Vaughan

[February 4 ] – At Dynatrace’s Perform 2025 user conference in Las Vegas, the observability software company announced Live Debugger, said to enable developers to non-invasively access runtime operations. Founder and CTO Bernd Greifeneder described this more succinctly, as “non-breaking break points.”

That’s succinct – but it borders on the paradoxical, oxymoronic or contradictory. What goes on?

The basic premise of the portfolio update is to allow developers to set a marker without interfering with the runtime. They can capture stack traces, variable values, and process information without the onerous labor of reproduction and redeployment. The new capabilities are supported directly from the Dynatrace platform or by using the company’s native Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDE plugins. And Dynatrace advises on ways to set breakpoints on interfaced programs where source code is unavailable. [Read more…] about At Dynatrace Perform 2025: Non-breaking break points make their point

Observer Monitor Dispatch: Dynatrace, StarTree, More

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Kubernetes defense in focus as Dynatrace rolls with Runecast tech

Kubernetes’ quick rise to prominence in cloud computing may have left a few holes in applications’ defenses. That is something Dynatrace looks to address with Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM) software. It’s said to employ observability data to enable quick response and mitigation of risks.

Dynatrace has a lineage when it comes to AI, originally arising out of the movement that placed AI agents on network nodes in order to track activity. KSPM employs  Dynatrace’s Davis hypermodal AI which combines predictive AI, Causal AI and Generative AI methods. The company said KSPM, thus accoutered, can ably convey immediate context for decision making as threats occur.

The company said  KSPM follows the integration of Runecast cloud native technology into the Dynatrace platform following the company’s successful acquisition earlier this year. Runecast technology supports continuous Kubernetes vulnerability scans, security compliance based on best practices, and remediation recommendations.

AI continues to find  renewed influence in the observability space. Updates are coming quickly, as this follow latest follows up on Dynatrace’s January roll-out of AI Observability extensions for large language models (LLMs).

 

StarTree Cloud extends observability

StarTree Cloud gains new observability and anomaly detection capabilities as well as vector search capabilities for its underlying Apache Pinot database engine with a new release reported by StarTree.

StarTree offers these services to customers of a cloud-based database-as-a-service that is specially targeting  analytics jobs. Like Confluent, StarTree arose out of the open-source activity of LinkedIn during the 2010s.

While Confluent has focused most effectively on data ingestion, StarTree has concentrated on data analytics, based on an implementation of the Pinot OLAP distributed columnar database.

The StarTree product suite is said to serve user-facing applications where a broad user base can query real-time data. The company noted DoorDash as a customer in this regard. The company said it partners with cloud and big data players such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Confluent, Databricks and others in customer engagements.

The observability functionality new to the platform should allow  StarTree users, serving as developers or system administrators, to troubleshoot issues that arise within their cloud-based applications.

StarTree announced the general availability of StarTree ThirdEye software, offering multidimensional anomaly detection. As well, a write API supporting real-time sync for ELT pipelines such as Debezium, Fivetran, or dbt , is now in “private preview,” and integrations with visualization platforms, including Tableau and Grafana are available now.

Like others, StarTree is bringing nearest-neighbor vector search capabilities to its users, as well as users of the open-source Apache Pinot project.

Besides DoorDash, StarTree cites customers such as  Citi, Stripe, Nubank, and Zomato. For its part, in March, Citi announced a strategic investment in StarTree.

At the time,  Katya Chupryna, Director, Markets Strategic Investments at Citi marked StarTree and the underlying Pinot engine for speed of data ingestion.

“User-facing analytics have seen profound growth in recent years across all industries, accelerating the need for enterprise-ready, real-time data solutions. StarTree and Pinot’s speed of ingestion is unmatched on complex queries over rapidly changing data,” Chupruna said.

Also on tap

Cisco announced a virtual appliance for its AppDynamics On-Premises application observability offering. It’s aimed at users looking for customer-managed observability for on-premises deployments or cloud-based deployments where the customer retains control of all data and associated operations. AI-Powered Detection and Remediation with Cisco’s Cognition Engine is said to speed anomaly detection and root cause analysis … Riverbed announced Riverbed Unified Agent which allows IT to add SaaS-delivered visibility modules – for example, for end user experience and network monitoring – without adding more agents. Riverbed’s Platform initially launches with approximately 35 pre-built application integrations for third-parties including ServiceNow, Dynatrace, AppDynamics and DataDog. A Topology Viewer generates dynamic mapping of connected devices, while Riverbed NPM+, using the Riverbed Unified Agent, is said to overcome network blind spots created by remote work, public cloud, and encrypted architectures such as Zero Trust environments. This, while extending packet visibility to collected decrypted data at every user and server endpoint, including gaps such as encrypted tunnels in Zero Trust architectures. [PG]

Observer Monitor: SolarWinds views observability on multicloud

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Today’s observability movement pits newbies fresh out of a few consulting gigs against established performance players with the “burden” of long-time customers. Established performance players have revenue, but they surf choppy waters.

The long-time performance players come to the fray with strong roots in tooling for applications, web monitoring and so on.

They continue to update their offerings in pursuit of observability. The observability software space is heavy on the metrics that can derive from log monitoring and, increasingly, full-out to include cloud native development, shift-left security, and multicloud support. This keeps vendors busy.

SolarWinds is among the performance incumbents that have embraced logs and gone cloud native. The company is building toward observability from foundations in mostly mid-market network performance and management products and services.

The company boosted its log analytics efforts markedly in 2018, with its acquisition of Loggly, which it has continued to field as an independent entity, even as it has integrated Loggly capabilities into its SolarWinds Observability platform.

Bridging the cloud gap

We spoke recently with Jeff Stewart, vice president for product management at SolarWinds. Under discussion were recent updates to SolarWinds Observability, originally released in 2023 to cloud-native and on-premises observability offerings.

The moves build on the 2022 release of SolarWinds Observability, which takes on application, infrastructure, database, network, log, and user experience observability, in the form of a SaaS platform.

Recent updates include query-oriented database monitoring enhancements, as well as improvements to visual explainer plan software.

The company is building out to the cloud at the same time that some users are reacting to rising cloud costs by more carefully picking what will be cloud bound. They will also judge what will be most closely monitored.

Said Stewart:

Customers are in different camps on their journey to the cloud, and migration of cloud workloads from on-premises to clouds like  Azure or AWS. We’ve seen customers that have gone full steam to the cloud, only to figure out that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to move all of their workloads, and that they should have been more selective based on security needs, budget needs or even performance needs, depending on where the application sits. And then there are people that have been very successful with their migration to the cloud. For existing customers that need visibility into different clouds, whether Azure or AWS, we’ve added capabilities in our hybrid cloud observability offering to support them on that journey. But we’ve also enabled them, as they make a decision to go more into the cloud to instantaneously start to send their data up to our SaaS offering.

What has appeared is a visibility gap on networks and security as users enter the realm of multicloud, according to Stewart, who touts Solar Wind’s lineage in network monitoring here. He said:

When applications or workloads are deployed across multicloud, we see some configurations where a part of the application is talking to another part of the application in a different cloud, which becomes very cost prohibitive. So, providing visibility into how traffic is traversing multicloud environments, as well as traffic that’s going from on-premises to the cloud, is a visibility gap that we see and are working to address with our offerings.

Database visibility

Clearly, visibility of database performance is no longer an isolated, on-premises event. And the database query in the multicloud space can introduce new complexity. The runaway query, which was a feature of early client-server’s darkside, is taking on a new tenor as hybrid and multicloud use grows wider.

Stewart said Solar Winds’ background in database performance positions it to deal with the new distributed computing paradigm. That’s where a variety of databases are in place, with locations that can span the globe.

Now, even high-level executives can view this activity, as observability metrics are rolled up. In e-commerce on-line selling, where efficient customer facing applications directly translate into revenue, they find query issues particularly telling.

My Take

Despite clear interest in observability tooling, the complex demands for monitoring modern systems challenge vendors and users alike.

Deeper and wider hybrid cloud environments can cause costs to rapidly escalate, requiring that IT users carefully pick and choose what they monitor.

Like others in the market, SolarWinds faces the challenge of keeping best-of-breed tools fresh for compartmentalized networking and database users, while building out an ever-broader platform of capabilities intended to run across broad multiclouds. – Jack Vaughan