Oracle Cloud Observability Eases Partners’ Management Burden

Oracle partners have a new option for cloud management, diagnostics and analytics. The company earlier this month unveiled Oracle Cloud Observability and Management.

Managing customers’ various cloud environments often proves no simple task. For the most part, each platform tends to require its own management tool. (Gartner says more than one-third of organizations have to rely on 30 or more.) So, the MSPs, VARs, ISVs and other channel players overseeing organizations’ assets often have a lot of interfaces to juggle.

There are three areas that make Oracle Cloud Observability and Management stand out. First, the platform contains machine learning, which enables it to detect anomalies and send alerts for remediation in real time. Next, it even prevents outages by forecasting impending issues. That’s a big deal. Unisphere Research has found that more than 80% of outages get reported by end users first, not by technology. That puts channel partners and their enterprise customer IT teams in constant reactive mode. Oracle Cloud Observability fixes that problem. And finally, the platform also is based on open standards, so it works out of the box with products including Slack, Grafana, Twilio and PagerDuty.

“Whether customers’ apps are deployed on Oracle Cloud, Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, on premises or in other public clouds, we are eliminating the complexity and reducing the risks and costs associated with today’s multitool approach to make the overall management process highly intuitive and cost-effective,” Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said.

Oracle’s Dan Koloski

Channel Futures sat down with Dan Koloski, vice president of product management at Oracle. We wanted to learn more about Oracle Cloud Observability and Management and what the channel needs to know.

Channel Futures: What does the launch of Oracle Observability mean for Oracle channel partners?

Dan Koloski: Oracle partners now have an entirely new set of high-value, differentiated services they can use to drive net-new business within their clients. That’s either through reselling or through implementation and usage services.

In particular, partners whose practices include running production workloads in Oracle Cloud, in on-premises data centers or in non-Oracle clouds, can use these services in their operational practices, while ISV and consulting partners who use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) can use these services to optimize the performance of workloads running in OCI. And integration partners can leverage the platform’s built-in, standards-based interoperability to provide impactful joint solutions to customers.

CF: What distinguishes this platform from the others that partners use on their customers’ behalf?

DK: Most other options in the market are siloed — either siloed to just one cloud (such as management consoles provided by cloud providers) or siloed to a particular tier or data type (such as APM or log tools provided by pure-play providers). We believe our solutions will provide better visibility and make our partners more efficient than the siloed solutions they may use today.

CF: What kind of interoperability does Oracle Cloud Observability and Management feature?

DK: This offering can be used to manage any technology, deployed anywhere. That includes Oracle and non-Oracle technology, deployed in Oracle Cloud, on premises or on third-party clouds. We support hundreds of non-Oracle technology components via both open standards (such as our fluentd agent, or by conformance with Cloud Native Computing Foundation standards) and through out-of-the box support for many commercial technologies as well.

CF: What expertise and/or training do partners need to use this platform?

DK: Partners can leverage their existing expertise in the technologies they use observability and management capabilities against. The actual Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform services are very easy to use. And Oracle offers training for these through our various training channels.

CF: What else is significant about Oracle Observability that partners should know?

DK: Using Service Connector Hub, we’ve made it easy, and at a very low cost, to integrate these services with all of the other tool sets partners may have in their existing ecosystem. This means you can use whatever combination of these services in the way that makes sense for you and your business.

CF: Anything else?

DK: Database-centric partners who are familiar with Oracle Enterprise Manager will be especially interested in the database management service. It makes many of the most popular enterprise management features available now from the cloud.