Out of all the different sub-ecosystems that have evolved around Docker, perhaps none is as active as the one where Sysdig Inc. is competing. Monitoring vendors both large and small are vying to fill the void left by legacy solutions that were not designed for containerized workloads with modernized alternatives specially adapted to the lightweight deployment model. The startup hopes to set its service apart with a new update that extends its value proposition beyond the containers themselves to the surrounding scaffolding.

Sysdig is starting with Kubernetes, the framework Google Inc. released to the open-source community last year to help simplify the management of composite Docker deployments that spread out their components across multiple instances. Its tracking service can now collect statistics about the various abstractions that the software uses to handle the orchestration of such clusters and correlate that data against the underlying infrastructure.

That includes everything from the storage environment to the network, all of which is brought together under a single view to spare administrators the hassle of connecting the dots on their own. The idea is that the less time has to be spent on figuring out the cause of an issue with Kubernetes, the faster it can be resolved. But it’s unlikely that Sysdig will be able to maintain a monopoly on that value proposition for very long.

The widespread adoption of the framework is bound to attract the attention of its fellow container monitoring providers sooner or later. As a result, the competition may end up shifting to some of the other open-source tools that have emerged in recent quarters to complement Docker. At the top of the list is ClusterHQ, a storage management utility that is gaining considerable steam in large deployments that require data to remain available even when the container to which it belongs is shut down.

Photo via FraukeFeind