Oracle Adds Open Source Plug-In for Cloud Data Monitoring

Oracle has unveiled a customized open source plug-in that will allow its customers to more deeply explore and use their stores of business data through open-source analytics and monitoring from Grafana.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Source for Grafana plug-in, announced by Nelson Hsu, director of Oracle’s product strategy and development in a post this week on the Oracle Blog, came about through collaboration with Grafana.

Oracle’s Nelson Hsu

“We worked closely with Grafana Labs on this integration, which provides robustness in monitoring, complemented by the work we have done to leverage Prometheus within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” wrote Hsu. “Cloud-native workloads demand greater observability, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure enables organizations to achieve this with a variety of tools, both native and third party.”

Grafana has generated significant interest and demand among Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers, wrote Hsu.

“This release continues to deliver on the Oracle Cloud Native Framework that we announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in December,” explained Hsu. “This framework includes our Oracle Cloud Infrastructure cloud-native services such as Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry and a tremendous number of new observability and application definition, development and provisioning abilities, which are all available as managed services.”

The use of the open-source tool fits with Oracle’s continuing strategy to help customers using every valuable technology that can be shared, he wrote.

“Open-source software is driving adoption and portability for the next-generation cloud. When you leverage open source technology and culture, cloud management becomes simpler across a distributed environment, making clouds interoperable, portable, and scalable. Without open source, you are locked in to a specific cloud model.”

The new Grafana plug-in “demonstrates our continued commitment to promote and provide open source solutions to our enterprise customers, providing them choice and flexibility to manage their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, hybrid, or multi-cloud workloads,” wrote Hsu.

Bob Quillin, vice president of developer relations for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, told Channel Futures that Oracle took on the project because cloud-native developers and DevOps teams are always looking for integrated and intuitive dashboards to collect, visualize and explore their metrics in one place for deeper insights.

Oracle’s Bob Quillin

“Cloud-native workloads demand greater observability, and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Source for Grafana provides new ways to explore cloud-native infrastructure and application data, to support log data, and to access new Grafana 6.0 features that have just been released,” said Quillin. “This includes out-of-the-box, aggregated metrics for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services and resources ,and also provides users with the ability to discover and retrieve metrics. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has achieved this as one of the first cloud providers to use this new Grafana 6.0 back-end API.”

While Oracle Cloud Infrastructure does provide its own core Oracle cloud metrics and visualization, the Grafana monitoring platform specializes in integrated visualization for all service, application and custom metrics, he explained.

“It was designed with a plug-in architecture that allows you to capture data across many different sources and visualize it on a single dashboard,” said Quillin.

Oracle chose to work with Grafana because of its commitment to an open-source model, its popularity in the industry and because of the significant amount of demand it has generated among Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers, he said.

“Grafana and Oracle share many of the same customers that are working in a cloud-native and open-source environment, sharing the same vision to avoid vendor lock-in.”

Oracle has released the plug-in as open source and channel partners can use it to integrate and build new dashboards and visualization solutions for their customers.