Cortex Query Builder Improves IT Operations Visibility, Site Reliability Engineering

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a core element of modern IT operations and DevOps, but without visibility into what's actually running, it's a job that isn't easy to do. That's where San Francisco-based startup Cortexis focusing its efforts — its technology is designed to help SREs and ITOps professionals recognize what software is running in their environments.

On Feb. 23, the company launched Cortex Query Builder, a service that provides users with the ability to query their environments to see what microservices processes are running. The ability to quickly identify running services can help users find systems that need to be patched for vulnerabilities as well as help identify service issues.

"Microservices lend themselves to an autonomous nature. You start seeing siloed teams building very specific parts of their software, and they don't have context on what other people are building," Anish Dhar, co-founder and CEO of Cortex, told ITPro Today. "The Cortex platform connects to all your internal sources and draws insights into the quality of the services being built."

Site Reliability Engineering Is Starting Point for Cortex Visibility

Any number of different types of IT staff within an organization can use Cortex, but the typical first place is with SRE professionals as they are the ones who maintain a function readiness checklist for operations, according to Dhar.

Related:Will SREs Make the ITOps Engineer Obsolete?

In large organizations, there can be an unwieldy volume of microservices running in products, which is why there needs to be a way to query an engineering system of record. Dhar said that Cortex can become that engineering system of record; services are queried with the Cortex Query Language.

With the new Cortex Query Builder, it's now easier for SREs to figure out complex queries and run them, Dhar said. Query Builder enables users to build complex queries that run across all of an organization's microservices, tooling and infrastructure, he said.

Dhar cited one example of a complex query built to show the services that had an outage during a specific time frame that didn't have a list IT owner. During the Query Builder's private beta period, Dhar said organizations were able to craft queries that detected instances of log4j, which enabled teams to patch the vulnerable services.

"Customers like Grammarly and SoFi used Cortex Query Builder to quickly find the impacted services [and] notify the owners, and they basically track the entire mitigation effort for that vulnerability using Cortex," he said. "They were able to do that because they had all their data in Cortex already."

Related:How ITOps and Site Reliability Engineer Roles Differ