IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig
Application performance monitoring (APM) tools
Monitoring software
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- Ease of management
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What is IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig
IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig is a cloud monitoring service on IBM Cloud that provides infrastructure and container/Kubernetes observability using Sysdig’s monitoring technology. It targets platform teams, SRE/DevOps, and operations teams that need metrics, dashboards, and alerting for IBM Cloud workloads and Kubernetes clusters. The service emphasizes agent-based collection and Kubernetes-aware views, with integration into IBM Cloud’s managed services and account model.
Kubernetes-aware monitoring views
The product provides monitoring oriented around Kubernetes concepts such as clusters, nodes, namespaces, and workloads. This helps teams troubleshoot containerized environments without manually mapping low-level host metrics to orchestrator objects. It is well-suited to operational monitoring of IBM Cloud Kubernetes deployments.
IBM Cloud service integration
As a managed IBM Cloud service, it fits into IBM Cloud provisioning, IAM/access controls, and billing. This can reduce setup overhead compared with self-hosted monitoring stacks. It also aligns with IBM Cloud operational workflows for teams standardizing on IBM’s platform.
Alerting and dashboards included
The service includes dashboards and alerting for common infrastructure and container metrics. Teams can use these features to establish baseline operational visibility and on-call notifications. This supports day-to-day monitoring use cases without requiring a separate visualization layer.
Primarily IBM Cloud focused
The service is designed for IBM Cloud environments and is typically adopted by organizations running workloads there. Teams operating across multiple public clouds may find governance and standardization harder if they want a single, cloud-agnostic observability layer. This can lead to parallel tooling when IBM Cloud is only part of the footprint.
APM depth may be limited
While it supports monitoring and troubleshooting for infrastructure and Kubernetes, it may not cover full-fidelity application performance monitoring needs for all languages and distributed tracing scenarios. Organizations that require deep code-level profiling, advanced trace analytics, or broad APM auto-instrumentation may need additional tooling. Fit depends on whether the primary requirement is platform monitoring versus end-to-end APM.
Agent and configuration overhead
Agent-based collection and Kubernetes integrations require deployment, upgrades, and configuration management. In regulated or locked-down environments, agent rollout and permissions can add operational friction. Ongoing tuning of alerts and dashboards is often needed to reduce noise and align with service-level objectives.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Usage-based / consumption (tiered time-series + per-node base).
Free tier/trial: IBM Cloud "Lite" plan available (catalog Lite: products available at no cost with no expiration); IBM also advertises a limited trial period for new accounts.
Example costs (from IBM official announcement):
- Base price: USD 35 per node (includes up to 1,000 time series and 50 containers per node) — infrastructure monitoring.
- Time-series tiers (platform-specific metrics beyond the 1,000 budget per node):
- Tier 1: USD 0.08 per time series — up to 100,000 time series.
- Tier 2: USD 0.05 per time series — 100,000–1,000,000 time series.
- Tier 3: USD 0.03 per time series — 1,000,000–10,000,000 time series.
- Tier 4: USD 0.02 per time series — >10,000,000 time series.
- Containers: USD 5 per additional 10 containers across all nodes (beyond the 50 containers included per node).
- API calls: First 1,000,000 metric-data-fetching API calls free; USD 0.01 per 1,000 API calls after the free allowance.
Notes & caveats (official IBM sources):
- Pricing announcement effective March 1, 2020 (IBM public announcement page). These line-item prices and the base node charge are published by IBM. cite
- IBM Cloud catalog/docs indicate the service offers a Lite plan by default (Lite = no-cost with no expiration) and provides additional service plans (for full functionality customers select Graduated Tier); see IBM Cloud documentation for provisioning and catalog definitions. cite
- IBM Cloud Monitoring release notes document deprecation of the "Graduated Tier - Sysdig Secure + Monitor" plan (Jan 18, 2024) and other plan changes — review docs for up-to-date plan availability before purchase. cite
Discounts / enterprise pricing:
- IBM advises customers to contact IBM sales for enterprise, volume, or contract pricing and geographic variations; no further public enterprise discount schedule was found on IBM public pages searched. cite
Seller details
IBM
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