Chronosphere and Google Cloud partner for cloud-native observability

As digital transformation continues apace, cloud native adoption has skyrocketed — and so has the volume, velocity, and variety of data that organizations must monitor to maintain visibility over their IT environments. Rather than a fixed number of virtual machines (VMs) running a single application each, systems are more flexible and ephemeral — with thousands of containers and microservices emitting data — and services and systems have greater interdependencies. All of this has led to an explosion in complexity that makes it nearly impossible to reliably and efficiently operate cloud-native services using traditional observability solutions without dramatically increasing overhead. 

Built on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Chronosphere is the only cloud-native observability solution that helps teams quickly resolve incidents before they affect the customer experience and the bottom line. And the relationship between Google Cloud and Chronosphere has developed into a growing partnership. Chronosphere brings the ability to rapidly and reliably control observability data and costs to Google Cloud customers, while maintaining open source compatibility. Recently, GV (Google Ventures) participated in Chronosphere’s $115 million round of Series C funding. Chronosphere is also available on Google Cloud Marketplace, making it easy for customers to procure and deploy.

Why Chronosphere chose to build on Google Cloud

Chronosphere’s founders, CEO, Martin Mao, and CTO, Rob Skillington, wanted to build an observability solution that solved some of the same problems they encountered when leading the observability team at Uber. The challenges at Uber focused on scale, reliability and cost, with a key emphasis on how these were not easily solvable for monitoring of cloud-native applications. Martin and Rob were looking to build a solution that was cloud-native, highly reliable, and capable of managing the high volume of data that modern organizations process every day. For those reasons, Martin and Rob chose to build Chronosphere on top of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): 

Cloud-native mindset: When Martin and Rob launched Chronosphere, one of the first considerations was this: A cloud-native problem needs a cloud-native solution. Google Cloud and Chronosphere work together to provide a purpose-built software-as-a-service (SaaS) observability solution platform for cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes. Chronosphere runs much of its critical infrastructure on Google Cloud, using the service’s global infrastructure to deliver secure and reliable services to hypergrowth customers.  

Open platform: Martin and Rob have a commitment to openness — a commitment that Google Cloud makes to its customers as well. All of the ins and outs of Chronosphere are open source compatible –built on GKE, the platform  ingests both metric and trace data in a variety of open source formats, such as Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and StatsD, so teams can get onboard easily while avoiding vendor lock-in. And they remain fully in control of how much data to ingest, how it’s ingested, how it’s stored, and for how long. That way, customers remain in control of their observability costs while their systems and data continue to grow, and can troubleshoot and remediate issues more quickly. 

Mission-critical performance: Observability is a mission-critical service because it is essential for the reliability and performance of mission-critical systems. For this reason, Martin and Rob wanted to offer the strongest service level agreements (SLAs) possible for availability, reliability, and performance. Google Cloud provides the secure global infrastructure that allows them to do so. 

Data volume: Modern organizations emit huge volumes of data that they have to sift through in near-real time to gain full visibility. Google Cloud offers the same infrastructure and networks that Google uses to support billions of users every day, capable of processing petabytes of data with ease. 

How Chronosphere works with Google Cloud

GKE provides specific technical benefits that Chronosphere leverages to offer customers the performance and availability they need to spend less time managing their observability systems and more time creating value. 

The Chronosphere collector is a Kubernetes-native, Prometheus-compatible agent that collects, processes, and exports telemetry data, including metrics and traces. When you install the collector in a Kubernetes cluster, it automatically discovers all your workloads and starts to gather data from them. 

The Chronosphere UI tailors the experience to each user based on what services that individual owns or which teams that person belongs to. This makes the overall user experience friendlier and less overwhelming while helping people get to the bottom of issues faster.

Running on GKE means that Chronosphere can leverage Google Cloud’s multiple zones in each geographic region to distribute workloads evenly, ensure customer data stores are isolated from each other, and build tolerance for zonal failures. It also allows for data persistence across multiple zones. At the same time, Google Cloud’s global load balancers bring the data physically closer to the customer, shortening the time it takes for a data point to be visible to a user after its emission.

What this means for customers

The partnership brings together the best in cloud-native services and cloud-native observability. With the power of Google Cloud and Chronosphere, observability teams can transform their observability data based on need, context, and utility, storing only the useful data to reduce costs and improve performance. With purpose-built solutions for a cloud-native world, teams gain faster issue detection and resolution, and also benefit from Chronosphere’s 99.99% availability and open source compatibility — eliminating vendor lock-in. 

“Companies growing their online infrastructure risk huge hits to their bottom line if they don't also manage increased complexity and cost,” says Martin. “Our partnership with Google Cloud brings together the world’s leading cloud services platform with our powerful observability solution to unlock the benefits of a cloud-native world, while optimizing for efficiency, reliability, and cost.”

Google Cloud and Chronosphere: The perfect match

Google Cloud and Chronosphere offer an industry-leading observability solution built from the ground up to abstract away the complexities of cloud computing for already stressed teams. And the future of this partnership is sure to bring new innovations around performance, reliability, and cost efficiency as both companies continue to invest in these three areas. The goal: to deliver the best performance for cost in the industry. 

Learn more about what Chronosphere and Google Cloud are doing for customers, and check out the Chronosphere listing on Google Cloud Marketplace.