Moogsoft Adds Health Monitoring for Docker Containers

Moogsoft, a startup that sells IT monitoring software for DevOps teams, has added the capability to monitor Docker containers and OpenStack clouds to its platform.

The startup’s two founders, Phil Tee and Mike Silvey, played a key role in the creation of Netcool, the technology that provides a lot of monitoring capabilities in IBM Tivoli, one of the most widely deployed IT operations management platforms.

Moogsoft’s core product, Incident.Moog, is an early-warning system that identifies problems in the IT environment. According to Moogsoft, it relies on machine learning rather than preset roles or models.

Docker is an open source technology that enables applications to share server resources without the added layer of a hypervisor and a guest operating system on every VM – the traditional form of sever virtualization. It also standardizes the way applications communicate their resource requirements, making them portable across different kinds of physical or virtual servers or clouds.

There is also a company called Docker, which leads the open source project and sells tools that help enterprises use containerization in their data centers. The company has been around for less than two years but the technology has already become popular with developers because it frees them from worrying about the infrastructure their applications are going to run on when they are writing them.

Moogsoft said its new monitoring feature offers visibility into code within Docker containers and software layers outside. Other tools, while aware of containers, do not provide such deep level of visibility, according to the company.

“Critically, it is impossible today to understand when an operational issue occurs in a containerized app, whether the issue is with the application or elsewhere in the supporting stack from the network through bare metal servers, hypervisors, OS, orchestration, containers, and so on,” Tee, the company's CEO, said in a statement.

The software looks at events from the containers themselves, output logs of containerized apps, management software, and monitoring systems. It integrates tightly with Docker and OpenStack APIs.

Moogsoft started shipping its software in 2012. The company has raised $23 million to date from Wing Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Cisco Investments among others.