The only one in China | Alibaba Cloud was selected into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability

Recently, Gartner released the "2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability" (Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability). The report shows that Alibaba Cloud is selected in this quadrant, which is the only selected manufacturer in China.

As the world's leading IT research and consulting firm, Gartner conducts in-depth research and analysis on the nearly 20 observable service providers with international influence selected this time from the dimensions of products, strategies, and market performance. Gartner defines Alibaba Cloud as a segment player (NICHE PLAYERS) in this Magic Quadrant. Its observable products include application real-time monitoring services ARMS and Prometheus monitoring as the core observable products of Alibaba Cloud, combined with cloud monitoring CMS and log service SLS. It provides out-of-the-box observable services for enterprises of different scales and different business needs in the form of public cloud SaaS services and hybrid cloud products, and evaluates Alibaba Cloud as follows:

• completeness of the solution

For enterprises deployed on Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Cloud provides a wealth of native observable solutions to meet many observable needs without implementing third-party solutions.

• strong ecosystem

Like many ultra-large-scale enterprises, Alibaba Cloud has a strong upstream and downstream product ecosystem, not only rich analysis tools, but also tight integration with tools such as DingTalk to achieve collaboration.

• The ultimate price-performance ratio

Compared with implementing third-party tools on Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Cloud observable products and solutions are more cost-effective and cost-effective.

Compared with last year, Alibaba Cloud's observable product capabilities have been significantly improved, including through the integration of the Grafana service data dashboard, the enhanced security function RASP, and the improved business analysis tools, and Alibaba Cloud's enterprise distributed application services EDAS, Nail. Nail and other native cloud services are tightly integrated to support different customer demand forms such as Alibaba Cloud ecosystem, multi-cloud, and local deployment. These functional enhancements and integrations have made Alibaba Cloud observable products higher than average in most key technologies and functions, and their security capabilities are among the best among many manufacturers.

Therefore, the report describes Alibaba Cloud capabilities as follows:

Alibaba Cloud monitoring is best suited to the application owners/line of business use case.

Different from previous years, the report pointed out that the cognitive and technical boundaries of application performance monitoring have further expanded, evolving from pure monitoring capabilities to exploratory and analysis-driven workflows centered on observability. In addition to market leadership, innovation, service perfection, technical support, and management team experience and capabilities, redefine the necessary technical capabilities and standards for observable manufacturers:

• Implement the observability of the complete transaction behavior of the application through Agent probe or distributed tracing (at least three mainstream languages or frameworks);
• Automatic discovery and mapping of applications and their infrastructure components, including cloud services;
• Monitoring and observability of applications running on mobile and PC browsers;
• Identify and analyze application performance issues and their impact on business operations;
• Native integration with automation tools, service management tools, public cloud vendors;
• Analytical capabilities for business goals and user journeys;
• Ability to analyze different observable data types such as Tracing links, Metrics indicators, Log logs, etc., to effectively identify potential problems of unexpected events;
• Enhance application security capabilities through probes and frameworks.

Combining the evolution of the above-mentioned technical capabilities and standards, we can see that with the continuous implementation of mobile, cloud-native, and enterprise cloud adoption, with the advantages of continuous enrichment of functions, accelerated value realization, and better price and cost, we can observe concepts and technologies. , gradually extending from the Internet and financial industries to government and enterprise units, manufacturing and other industries, and the audience has also expanded from traditional operation and maintenance engineers to different teams such as SRE engineers, architects, and R&D engineers. Observation has become an important means of digital transformation and innovation for enterprises.

As a leader in the domestic observability field, Alibaba Cloud was once again shortlisted in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. This is due to Alibaba Cloud's continuous technological innovation learning and product optimization and upgrading in the observable field. Since 2017, ARMS, an application real-time monitoring service born out of Alibaba Group's monitoring product "Eagle Eye", was born to provide enterprises with application performance management (APM) capabilities; digital experience (DEM) capabilities from front-end monitoring, cloud dialing and testing have gradually increased ; to fully embrace open source standards such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Opentelemetry. In June this year, Alibaba Cloud Observability Suite (ACOS) was launched to create a complete observable data ecosystem and product suite in the cloud-native era.

"Alibaba Cloud Observability Suite" is an observable solution for the cloud-native era created by Alibaba Cloud. It centers on the Prometheus service, Grafana service, and link tracking service, and forms a system for indicator storage analysis, link storage analysis, and heterogeneous data source integration. The observable data layer, through standard PromQL and SQL, provides data display, alarm and data exploration capabilities. For business scenarios such as enterprise IT cost management, enterprise risk management, efficient operation and maintenance, and business continuity assurance, it provides complete observable solutions for business personnel, SREs, R&D personnel, and operation and maintenance personnel. From design to implementation, the observable product suite is "born for the cloud and embraces open source", which not only helps customers to obtain more complete and stronger observability capabilities, but also avoids the worry of vendor lock-in, and also greatly helps customers save operation and maintenance. cost.

In the era where everything is a cloud, observability makes cloud computing easier and more efficient, and it also maximizes the business value of observable data. "Observation" has become an essential core competency for every IT person. More than just observations, observables help companies analyze, gain insights, and enable high-quality decision-making and business innovation. Alibaba Cloud will continue to promote the evolution and implementation of observable technologies to help enterprises truly achieve high-quality digital transformation and innovation.