
Apica today made available a free edition of its telemetry data management and observability platform that can be used to process up to 1TB per month of logs, metrics, traces, events and alerts.
The company has been making a case for a unified approach to collecting this data using open source tools to pull data from multiple sources, including DevOps, IT operations and cybersecurity platforms.
The Apica platform relies on open source software such as OpenTelemetry, Fluent Bit and Logstash to collect data from those platforms. The overall goal is to make it simpler for platform engineering teams to unify observability using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.
Ranjan Parthasarathy, chief product and technology officer for Apica, said that approach will make it simpler for platform engineering teams to unify data collection across multiple observability use cases.
As observability is applied across a broader range of use cases, IT teams are struggling with managing massive amounts of telemetry data collected from a wide range of platforms. Unifying the collection of that data makes it simpler for platform engineering teams to make sense of it on an end-to-end basis, said Parthasarathy. IT organizations, in general, should not be investing in bespoke observability platforms, he added.
At the core of the Apica Ascent platform is an indexing engine built on top of a Kubernetes platform that aggregates data such as logs, traces and network packets from multiple sources. Designed to be deployed anywhere, the platform reduces storage costs by trimming excess data that can be stored in a data lake it provides or, if a customer prefers, a third-party data lake. Apica in 2023 acquired Logic.ai to add a data fabric capability to a core platform that is based on an object storage system and Flow telemetry pipeline management software.
As more IT teams move beyond simply monitoring a set of pre-defined metrics, they are encountering challenges with everything from managing agent software for collecting data to storage costs that are spiraling out of control.
Obviously, 1TB of telemetry data per month of observability data is primarily aimed at platform engineering teams that are just being formed. Many of them are already trying to unify the management of what can eventually become petabytes of data. The challenge, however, is getting multiple silos within an IT organization to agree on a standard approach to collecting telemetry data with an eye toward eventually normalizing it in a way that makes applying advanced analytics simpler. In the meantime, Apica is making it simpler to, at the very least, create a proof-of-concept (PoC).
Ultimately, there will come a day when IT organizations are simply overwhelmed by the amount of telemetry data they need to manage. Once that happens, it will become simpler to have a conversation about setting up a platform engineering team to achieve that goal in an era where the complex relationship between various applications and platforms has never been more challenging to observe and manage.