Simplify Observability with Unryo:
Looking Back On A Thrilling Year Of Innovation
January 19, 2021
As we gear up for an exciting 2021, we are thrilled to share some of the key innovations we have added to our flagship Unryo, IT monitoring tool, over the past year. 2020 was a challenging yet productive year for the Unryo team. We made great strides in the area of monitoring and analytics for DevOps teams, and also progressed further to get closer to achieving our vision of automated observability.
Since the beginning of our journey, we have built Unryo as a performance monitoring platform that’s “ready-to-use” in minutes instead of hours. But this doesn’t mean that ease of use trumps power – because it does not!
Unryo is highly powerful, and can handle virtually every requirement service providers may have around customization, scalability and hybrid multicloud deployments. To accomplish this, we have unified the best monitoring open sources – Influx, Elastic, Grafana, Fluentd and now Jaeger – through a common control plane, and strengthened them with secure connectivity and a central console. We have also added a plethora of amazing features so the platform becomes easy to deploy and operate.
Agility, Simplicity and Scalability: The Unbeatable Trifecta from Unryo!
In this post, we will look at the innovations we have added in 2020 to the Unryo monitoring tool. These innovations provide users with better visibility, easier troubleshooting and greater control.
We will explore the following:
Smooth, seamless experience for both SaaS and on-premise deployments
Unryo is available as a SaaS solution where we host and manage everything for you. For organizations that want to keep their data on premises, they can opt for our fully-deployable solution in their hybrid cloud environments.
In 2020, we’ve simplified the deployment. So whether you deploy the complete platform (on-premise customers) or deploy your collectors (SaaS customers), it’s just a matter of following a simple wizard that drives you all the way.
With the all-in-one-installer, deploying a complete stack takes few minutes. No file to edit, no IP to set. Why? Because all Unryo components, which are containers, are driven by a central cloud connectivity service, called Unryo Connect. This service tells every Unryo component how to connect with the platform, automatically and securely. It hides all the complexity of operating and managing a platform, even when you have to deal with thousands of collectors spread across multiple data centers. This service also provides a single point of control during the entire life-cycle of the platform. You have for example, health information for all your platform components, versions, geo-map view, and are alerted when a file-system is almost full or if a service is under pressure.
One-Click Provisioning, with the Unryo Vault and Templates
Once the Unryo components are deployed, the fun part begins! One of our most exciting updates in 2020 was the addition of the Unryo Vault and the Single Configuration UI to our core platform. Now, all your configurations are stored in encrypted format in a vault, which serves as the communication channel back to your collectors. This means you can:
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Store and encrypt all configs
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Receive configs from the UI and APIs
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Serve requests from components
And the vault can reside on prem or in the cloud – your choice!
Administrators then have a single UI where they manage all the configurations for metrics, logs, traces, analytic and tagging. This UI eliminates data silos. And no matter whether you’re configuring a metric polling, a log parsing rule or a trace instrumentation – the same dead-simple workflow applies: pick your template and push the config to the target collectors. Easy! Say goodbye to SSH, file transfers, password copy or third-party configuration tools. Adding, updating or removing a configuration to one or hundreds collectors requires just one click.
More good news: everything you can do with the UI is available through the API!
A Common – and Extensible – Model Across Metrics, Logs And Tracing
Unryo is a comprehensive IT infrastructure monitoring tool.
And it monitors everything – and we mean everything – with metrics, analytics logs and tracing:
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Full-stack application performance monitoring
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Network monitoring
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Cloud monitoring
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Server monitoring
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Database monitoring
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Infrastructure monitoring
Each piece of data is marked with a set of common tags, such as the resource name, resource type and technology. This unified model makes it easy to identify, search, group and filter data later on in dashboards and alerts.
Moreover, in Unryo, this model is extensible. We have added a powerful tagger that allows you to enrich multiple data points with your own tags before storage so you have the critical context your business needs.
Tags available:
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Customer name
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Business units,
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Geolocation
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Service levels
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Maintenance periods
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…or any other information!
Say, you want to tag resources with their business unit and geolocation. Using a tagging configuration like the configuration below, you define tags from a CSV reference file, then you can group resources to provide more context for your data:
Out-of-the-box Integrations for the Full Stack (and Beyond!)
Many users love the built-in templates in our growing library! You too will surely appreciate the automatic way of just picking up a template and start monitoring your infrastructure within just a few minutes.
We have also added plenty of other technologies in 2020!
We improved our dashboards and added more built-in alerts. Moreover, Unryo now covers a variety of popular technologies, from servers and networks, to applications and clouds.
Here are some of the integrations we have added recently:
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Azure Event Hub
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Kubernetes
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Traffic Flow
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SpeedTest
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Microsoft Azure
Looking to consolidate your monitoring and centralize data from multiple systems? With Unryo’s ready-to-use integration packs, you can do both – in minutes!
Check out some of our other key integrations:
Now you can even create your own monitoring!
Collectors support multiple protocols to collect data from devices, IoT sensors, applications and virtually any other data source. Once the data is in, take advantage of the editor to create KPIs. And if you need interactive dashboards, there are plenty of graph options to help you along!
You also have access to a data explorer to browse quickly through all your metrics, logs, traces and metadata.
Simplified and customizable monitoring at its very best!
Search Across All Logs
You are probably logging events from various systems, right? Most organizations do. And like them, your teams need a way to see all these disparate events in one place so they can search with keywords, do live tails, and even get alerts when a specific log occurs. With Unryo, all of this is possible!
We have recently added key log features by integrating (and curating) the most scalable open-source tools available today. For instance, Fluentd is used to ingest logs from every source (syslog, files, docker, SNMP traps, traffic flows, CDRs, etc), while Elastic acts as the search engine. And once again, the configuration is quite simple: all your multiple log endpoints are controlled from Unryo's single UI.
Hassle-free monitoring, quick alerts and enhanced search – only in Unryo!
Application Observability
In 2020, we added a “tracing” feature to our platform, right alongside metrics and logs to transform Unryo into a complete observability platform.
Distributed Tracing provides insights into the performance and health of a deployed application. By tracking each function or microservice which handles a given request, it helps you understand what is happening in your application, whether it is a monolithic application, or a distributed application with hundreds of microservices. More importantly, you can effortlessly monitor every app, and debug visually for a quick investigation of root cause(s).
If you are looking for a way to know which of your services are affected so you can find and eliminate bottlenecks – Unryo is perfect for you!
Real-time Alerting and Notifications
The Unryo Analytic Engine analyzes each piece of data that comes into the Unryo platform in real-time and in a streaming manner. It also detects anomalies in real time so you can take quick action whenever required.
In the last year, we have extended the number of built-in analytic rules in the platform. These rules are loaded by default and tell you automatically when something is a problem or at-risk, such as an AWS VM in trouble, a Kubernetes PODs running out of memory, or users having a degraded experience.
Out-of-the-box, 100+ analytics template rules – for all common devices and applications!
Another major improvement that we completed recently is the addition of our cutting-edge alerting UI. This console simplifies the creation and modification of alerts, even for users who are not familiar with the data model. The UI currently works on time-series metric data, and can be extended to alert on logs as well. In this case, it triggers an alert on the presence (or absence) or logs.
Yet another awesome example of Unryo simplification: the ability to create sophisticated alerts from the same UI on top of disparate data – metrics, logs or trace!
Cisco IP-SLA, Juniper RPM, Class-Based QoS and more
If you are already familiar with SNMP, you know that MIBs (Management Information Base) that involve tables with cross-indexes are hard to poll by generic SNMP pollers. Good examples are Cisco IP-SLA MIBs and QoS MIBs. With Unryo, we have introduced SNMP technology-dedicated plugins that are specifically designed to poll the exact information from tables and variables, then filter and cross-reference data efficiently before sending it to the database with the right tags and fields.
Multi-tenancy
We know how important it is for service providers and organizations to have data by tenant.
All the data that arrives in the Unryo platform – metrics, logs and traces – is tagged with the collector instance identifier. Queries can use this tag to filter out or split data by collector or tenant. Alerting, which subscribes to the data stream, can use the same tag for filtering data. And to provide even more options, you can mark data with your own tag(s), and put in place a logic to define what is a tenant.
Optimization, automation, easy filtering: seamless multi-tenancy, only with Unryo!
A common API (with tons of concrete examples!)
The Unryo REST API allows you to interact programmatically with Unryo at every level, and integrate key functions of Unryo into your DevOps stack.
We wanted to provide you clear examples that cover 99% of typical use cases – and in 2020, we managed it! Now, whether you want to provision the platform or extract some data, we have documented a bunch of calls so your admins and developers can get up to speed rapidly.
Another important consideration is tool consolidation and a single pane of glass. Do you have existing tools you want to connect in or replace in Unryo? Not a problem! The Unryo API provides lot of options, inbound and at the portal level. We also have tools to re-import your historical data from monitoring tools such as Zabbix or Solarwinds, and from any data source.
Integrate key functions of Unryo into your DevOps stack – with the Unryo REST API!