Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Kubernetes continues to be a popular platform for deploying containerized applications, but securing Kubernetes environments as you scale up is challenging. Each new container increases your application’s attack surface, or the number of potential entry points for unauthorized access. Without complete visibility into every managed container and application request, you can easily overlook gaps in your application’s security as well as malicious activity.

If you are running a user-facing web application, you likely implement some form of authentication flow to allow users to log in securely. You may even use multiple systems and methods for different purposes or separate groups of users. For example, employees might use OAuth-based authentication managed by a company-provided Google account to log in to internal services while customers can use a username and password system or their own Google credentials.

Datadog dashboards provide a unified view of your application, infrastructure, and business data, giving stakeholders the context they need to make decisions. Sharing dashboards publicly is useful when you want to make them easily accessible to a large audience. But oftentimes, your dashboards include sensitive information, which is why you need finer-grained controls over the data you share—and who you share it with.

When an alert triggers in your application or environment, you want your team to know as soon as possible so you can troubleshoot quickly and minimize any user-facing issues. Datadog can automatically alert you via email and collaboration services like Slack and PagerDuty. The simple, real-time communication provided by SMS can also be an effective way to alert your team.

Cloud Foundry is an open source deployment and orchestration platform that gives developers a readymade workflow for launching applications without configuring the underlying infrastructure. VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs (TAS) is a commercially available certified platform for Cloud Foundry that provides complementary products like a partner network, auto-scaling CLI, and operations interface, and is used by enterprise-level customers like T-Mobile, The Home Depot, and Comcast.

Microsoft 365 is a suite of cloud-based productivity and communication services that includes Microsoft Office applications (including OneNote and OneDrive) as well as other popular Microsoft tools like Skype and Teams. Microsoft 365 tools and services are at the core of many organizations’ data management and day-to-day workflows, so monitoring activity across your environment is key to making sure that these services remain secure and meet compliance standards.

When investigating a complex system—or learning about it for the first time—you need to explore metrics, traces, logs, and other kinds of data. But as you navigate across different views of your data in dashboards, alert notifications, flame graphs, and so on, it can be hard to keep track of what you have already seen. When a potential issue comes up and time is tight, the last thing you need is to spend time remembering a crucial graph or finding the right browser tab.

For complete visibility into the performance of your applications, you need telemetry data—traces, metrics, and logs—that describes activity across your entire stack. But if you’re using multiple monitoring tools, your data can end up in silos, making it difficult to troubleshoot issues that affect your user experience.

Without unified visibility across your entire stack, it can be difficult to investigate backend dependencies when troubleshooting frontend issues, or to track the source of database failures that originate from bad browser requests. Full-stack visibility gives you the insight you need to pinpoint and resolve incidents quickly.

Whether you’re deciding on follow-up items for a postmortem, submitting a request-for-comments for review, or creating an executive report, making sense of all the available data and collaborating with others to tell a clear, data-driven story can be difficult. When there are multiple stakeholders and teams working together, it can be hard to manage the back-and-forth process of feedback and revision to ensure you have up-to-date information.