SignalFx
Driving Seamless Cloud Migration

The technological landscape is witnessing a fundamental platform shift with software delivered as a service and organizations needing to release products and services more frequently. The heavy reliance on in-house applications for infrastructure upgrades at large cloud-scale organizations was first noticed by our founding engineering team when they built the application monitoring system to scale Facebook’s cloud infrastructure during a time of tremendous growth. Foreseeing the rising and inevitable tidal wave of cloud adoption across all enterprises and the lack of quality commercial solutions, SignalFx was born to offer the leading real-time cloud-scale monitoring solution for the rest of the world, enabling a true “move fast without breaking things” DevOps culture.

Karthik Rau, co-founder and CEO, observes that organizations embarking on their cloud transformation journey experience three phases: ‘experimentation,’ as they test new cloud strategies; ‘decentralized chaos’ as cloud-native platforms, tools and processes proliferate; and finally ‘organized enablement’ brought about by standardization of enterprise-grade production applications. “SignalFx is the only solution that helps companies address their monitoring needs from experimentation, all the way to organized enablement,” explains Rau, CEO and co-founder of SignalFx. By offering the best-in-class monitoring solution for AWS, SignalFx empowers organizations to monitor the short-lived and highly dynamic components dominating modern cloud architectures.

SignalFx effectively ingests any time series metric data streaming in from the customers environment, including infrastructure data, CPU, memory, network, disk metrics, API latency metrics, and application data from middleware components like Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, and Zookeeper. “SignalFx provides proactive problem mitigation through real-time alerts to avoid firefighting. Our differentiation is that we collect all the data and provide best-in-class solutions for companies at every stage,” explains Mark Cranney, chief commercial officer of SignalFx.

SignalFx helps phase 1 clients—those experimenting with cloud services—to have a comprehensive view of their AWS environment and insights in every process in that environment thanks to easy-to-navigate dashboards. In the next phase, SignalFx helps organizations experimenting with microservices effectively consolidate and integrate their application performance management (APM) and logging solutions, dashboards, and alerting for container architectures like Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, and ECS.

By making it easy for developers to custom instrument application metrics, SignalFx’s clients can understand patterns across their entire microservices landscape, and receive comprehensive smart alerts made possible by SignalFlow, the patented real-time analytics engine capable of processing billions of data points from millions of sources. For phase 3 clients, SignalFx provides top of the line service bureau capabilities, empowering developers to collect and analyze real-time custom application metrics at a scale no one else can. “We help across the entire journey,” affirms Rau.

SignalFx provides proactive problem mitigation through real-time alerts and avoids firefighting

Impressed by SignalFx’s simplicity in empowering cloud transformation, a large consumer goods company asked SignalFx to solve the problem of consolidating and coordinating ten different monitoring solutions across every division. With SignalFx’s centralized approach, the client now has a standardized platform across their entire digital organization, providing real-time monitoring of Lambda architecture for all their power users. Real-time monitoring is key in enabling the client to gain deeper visibility as they scale their Amazon environment to thousands of servers. The client continues to leverage SignalFx not only for maintaining transparency but also for its real-time alerting system that proactively identifies issues across their entire business.

For early adopters experimenting with new technologies, SignalFx’s dedicated engineers stay focused on the latest trends to provide a completely packaged, integrated, and leading-edge solution. “To further strengthen the monitoring solution across the entire lifecycle, we are building more sophisticated tools around detection and alerting, root cause analysis, and correlation, as well as expanding to other cloud platforms, coming soon in 2018,” Rau concludes.