DeepFactor today launched what it describes as the first continuous monitoring platform designed specifically for pre-production environments.
Company CEO Kiran Kamity said the DeepFactor Pre-Production Monitoring platform combines security, performance and behavior monitoring in one offering. Based on a “Deep Passive Monitoring” capability that requires developers to add a file to a container image to instrument an application, the platform feeds the telemetry data collected via that file to an Application Runtime Intelligence engine. That engine surfaces potential security and performance issues as well as risky and unexpected behavior changes between versions of applications, he said.
Scans of application environments are launched via a DeepFactor portal. Each scan is then compared to a set of configurable rules that are developed and maintained by the DeepFactor research team to identify indicators of application misbehavior. The engine also learns the application environment, which over time enables DeepFactor to generate alerts based on threshold triggers, known bad behaviors, anomaly detection and other attributes.
The DeepFactor Pre-Production Monitoring platform also comes with pre-packaged integrations for widely employed DevOps tools including Jira, Jenkins, Slack and GitHub.
In addition to the commercial platform, DevOps teams can also make use of a DeepFactor Standard Edition, which is free for non-commercial open source projects with no user limitations.
In an ideal world, developers would address issues, including security, long before an application is deployed to a production environment. The issue is that developers are asked to navigate too many tools to achieve that goal. The DeepFactor Pre-Production Monitoring platform will make it easier for developers to surface insights in a frictionless way, said Kamity.
Most organizations that embrace best DevOps practices embrace observability as a core tenet. The challenge they face is making it easy for developers to instrument applications as they are built and then making sense of all the telemetry data collected. That’s especially critical as developers attempt to strike a balance between remediating security issues and optimizing performance to better ensure the overall user experience. Existing developer tools are optimized for performance; asking developers to switch tools to address potential cybersecurity issues is a task that can be delayed to the point where it is essentially forgotten or simply ignored.
It’s not clear to what degree DevOps teams might have the budget dollars required to deploy their own monitoring tools versus relying on the existing monitoring tools provided deployed by an IT operations team. However, it does usually take a significant amount of time to deploy and update the agent software that legacy IT monitoring platforms require. DeepFactor is making the case for capturing telemetry data using a comparatively lightweight container that can be added to either a monolithic or microservices-based application.
Of course, if an application is already instrumented in a pre-production environment it might make sense to use the same monitoring platform to observe applications in a production environment. However, convincing IT operations teams to swap out their existing monitoring tools for something that makes the lives of developers easier might be a tall order.
