Datadog provides visibility into Kubernetes apps with new container map

As companies turn increasingly to containerization, it creates challenges in terms of monitoring each individual container and the impact on the underlying application. This is particularly difficult because of the ephemeral nature of containers, which can exist for a very short time. Datadog introduced a container map product today that could help by bringing visualization to bear on the problem.

“With his announcement, what we are doing is introducing a container map to show you all of the containers across your system,” Ilan Rabinovitch, VP of Product Management at Datadog told TechCrunch. This could enable customers to see every container at any given time, organize them into groups based on tags, then drill-down to see what’s happening within each one.

The company makes use of tags and metadata to identify the different parts of the containers and their relationship to one another and the underlying infrastructure. The tool monitors containers much like any other entity in Datadog.

“Just as the host map does with individual instances, the container map enables you to easily group, filter, and inspect your containers using metadata such as services, availability zones, roles, partitions, or any other dimension you like,” the company wrote in a blog post introducing the new feature.

While Datadog won’t help a company directly remediate a problem as it avoids having write access to a company’s systems, the customer can use Web hooks or a serverless trigger like an Amazon Lambda function to invoke some sort of action should certain conditions be met that could compromise or break the application.

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The company is simply acting as a third party watching to make sure the containers all behave properly. “We trust Kubernetes to do what it should do. But when something breaks, you need to be able to understand what happened, and Kubernetes is not designed to do this,” Rabinovitch said. The new map features provides that missing visibility into the container system and lets users drill down inside individual containers to pinpoint the source of a problem.