Sysdig today said it deepened its relationship with IBM Cloud and extended support to the public cloud provider’s entire portfolio.

“If you’re building or deploying an IBM service using Watson APIs, or building apps on the IBM Cloud, what we provide is an out-of-the-box default dashboard,” said Sysdig CMO Janet Matsuda in an interview with SDxCentral.

Sysdig became the defacto monitoring tool for IBM Cloud customers in 2018 with the launch of the ever so imaginatively named IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig dashboard. "Sysdig monitor is the CloudWatch for the IBM Cloud platform," said Matsuda, comparing Sysdig to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) monitoring platform.

However, the Sysdig platform didn’t initially extend to all of IBM’s Cloud offerings. Starting today, Sysdig says IBM Cloud users can now extend visibility to services like IBM Watson, Event Streams, Cloud Database, Cloud Object Storage, and Cloud Foundry.

“As enterprises increasingly migrate workloads to the public cloud, they need a simple and efficient way to monitor performance and availability across their infrastructure, applications, and services,” said Jason McGee, CTO at IBM Cloud Platform, in a statement.

Founded in 2013, Sysdig has focused on addressing the challenges of cloud-native computing, namely security and performance monitoring in an environment where resources can spin up and down in a matter of minutes and traditional monitoring philosophies simply don't work.

“This Kubernetes world and container world is different than if someone was a monitoring expert in [virtual machines],” said Matsuda. “Cloud-native applications can be complex, and they generate volumes of data that must be correlated and contextualized so that organizations can understand the health of their applications."

And, according to Sysdig, the complexity of monitoring and securing remain some of the most daunting barriers to the adoption of cloud-native technologies like containers, microservices, or Kubernetes.

However, the company's monitoring capabilities now extend far beyond cloud-native workloads and IBM’s own portfolio. Last month, Sysdig announced support for the open source Prometheus monitoring standard.

“It’s very popular with developers because it's really easy to spin up a Prometheus server and start to use it. The PromQL language is very powerful in the way that you can combine different metrics, look at things together, and draw correlations,” said Matsuda, adding that Sysdig’s decision to add support for Prometheus and the Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) only helped to cement IBM’s relationship with Sysdig.

“IBM expanded their use of monitoring from Sysdig because it’s simple to use, it met their scale requirements, and it allows developers to stick with the Prometheus monitoring standard they prefer,” she said. “It’s really about helping people along their journey with tools they might be familiar with already.”

Jake Kitchener, senior technical staff member at IBM, praised Sysdig's monitoring capabilities and cited the value of the platform's Prometheus compatibility in a recent episode of the Popcast podcast.

"We have a huge number of joint customers that benefit from the Sysdig and IBM relationship. We have a very symbiotic relationship," he said. “Sysdig makes IBM Cloud better because we have Sysdig Monitor as part of our platform to run our day-in and day-out operations. I do not have to worry about trying to keep Prometheus alive with a year’s worth of historical metrics.”