CoScale: Performance Monitoring of Container Environments

The emergence of containers and microservices represents a new application architecture that facilitates the transition from monolithic legacy applications to smaller, discrete functions or processes. One of the key drivers is the need for an agile development method that promotes shorter release cycles, higher quality software, and improved user experience. In the wake of increasing container adoption, traditional APM tools have a hard time keeping up with these dynamic and scalable environments, built on new technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. Adapted “container-native” tools are required to maintain visibility and control over the performance of these containerized environments. CoScale provides an integrated platform for full stack container monitoring. “CoScale is optimized for large and dynamic production environments, with lightweight non-intrusive container and application instrumentation,” explains Stijn Polfliet, CEO and co-founder of CoScale.

CoScale was conceptualized when Polfliet and his colleague Frederick Ryckbosch were completing their Ph.D. in Belgium. The duo was part of a group called Performance Lab and was researching on performance monitoring while focusing on innovative technology and new application architectures. “Perceiving the need for a solution that could effectively monitor software environments for container and microservices-based applications, we developed novel instrumentation techniques and machine learning algorithms to automate the analysis of performance data,” says Polfliet.

Utilizing their experience, the CoScale platform was designed to monitor the full stack of containerized applications. This full stack includes hosts, orchestrators, and services running in containers, along with its impact on user experience and key business metrics. Due to service and container-specific visualizations, performance or capacity problems can be detected before it affects end users. Using a lightweight agent, CoScale provides real-time insights across multiple hosts and containers while adding minimal overhead to the system, in contrast to traditional APM tools. It integrates with various container orchestrators including Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and OpenShift and has plugins for specific applications that run inside the container, such as Nginx or Redis.