SUSE launches a cloud observability service

Luxembourg-based SUSE has long offered various services around its various Linux- and cloud-centric infrastructure and security tools. Yet what the company didn’t really offer before was a more traditional SaaS product. That’s changing now with the early access launch of SUSE Cloud Observability, a fully managed observability platform designed for Rancher-managed multi-cloud Kubernetes clusters.

Rancher, SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen told me, is a key growth engine for SUSE, with customers that include the U.S. government, for example.

“All these, all these vendors come with very complex, highly opinionated stacks where you have to follow the exact recipe of the vendor. That’s not what you want in an open source world, because you have people that know exactly what works best for them in what situation, and Rancher is a very fit-for-purpose component in that solution — and customers like that, especially in combination with the fast time to production,” van Leeuwen said.

It’s no surprise then that SUSE is doubling down on this part of its business with the launch of this new observability solution.

SUSE Cloud Observability, which is based on SUSE’s acquisition of StackState earlier this year, allows enterprises to monitor their workload in Rancher-managed clusters across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. To get users started, the service offers a set of pre-configured policies and dashboards.

“We were really missing a full stack observability solution,” van Leeuwen said. “We had some observability connectivity ability, but full-stack observability was — even if you look at the how we were rated by Gartner and others — was really the missing piece in our overall Kubernetes solution. And adding it is a very important factor.”

Van Leeuwen also stressed that this is SUSE’s first SaaS-based service. “It’s also our first step into a software as a service solution,” he said. “We didn’t have any SaaS. So it also takes us into into that side of the business that is an important part of how customers like to consume software.” He also noted that there may be other solutions where this model may make sense for SUSE.

In addition to launching this new observability service, SUSE is also launching its AI platform into general availability. The company first announced its AI services in June, with a focus on offering enterprises a vendor- and LLM-agnostic generative AI platform.

What customers are looking for with regard to AI is security and scalability, van Leeuwen said. SUSE, he stressed, is an infrastructure company at heart, so it’s not interested in deciding which large language model its users should deploy. “If you’re providing an infrastructure layer, then you’re effectively the guys who supplied the shovels and the diggers to the gold miners, without having to mine yourself, and that’s what we’re doing, in a way, for AI: making sure it runs perfectly and securely.”

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