Prices

Although Coroot itself is open source, many tracing functions, especially those based on AI functions, can only be accessed in the cloud, for which you need to create an account with Coroot; the Coroot instance in your data center then uses this account for communication.

Coroot's pricing model is not likely to cause any heart attacks. Standard and premium editions differ from each other primarily in terms of available support. The premium edition also offers proactive monitoring according to the rate, error, duration (RED) principle, which means raising an alarm if certain threshold values are exceeded in the scope of SLO monitoring (Figure 5).

Figure 5: If you promise your customers certain service targets, you need to be able to monitor compliance. Coroot can map SLOs and automatically check for compliance. © Coroot

This feature is not available in the Standard Edition, which costs $1 per month and monitored CPU core, although Coroot offers volume discounts. The vendor does not publicly list the prices for the Premium Edition – quite possibly they are subject to individual agreements with respective customers.

Conclusions

In some ways, Coroot feels like a glimpse into the future of observability in distributed setups. Where slow solutions such as Nagios and the like previously handled monitoring, today's technical requirements have exceeded their capabilities and brought new approaches such as Coroot to the fore.

The tool stands out in several respects. It doesn't need extensive instrumentation that developers have to wrap around their apps for things to work; instead, it relies on eBPF to collect the relevant data. Coroot is not only capable of analysis by profiling individual components, but it can also evaluate metrics data from Prometheus and analyze logfiles. It uses all of these sources to provide in-depth insights into the current status of a container-based setup. Additional features such as automated threat detection, comprehensive analysis of the quality of a service provided, and comprehensive cost monitoring for cloud-based services round things out.

Unlike other solutions, organizations do not need to worry about making provisions for insolvency if they want to use Coroot, because the pricing is reasonable. That said, European admins might find that the need to access a non-European cloud for a large part of the Coroot functionality spoils the fun.

The Author

Martin Loschwitz is the founder and managing director of True West IT Services GmbH, which offers scalable IT infrastructure based on OpenStack and Kubernetes.