Introducing Lens AppIQ

Lens AppIQ – a natural extension of Lens – delivers app-centric intelligence: enabling cloud-native developers to release and manage Kubernetes applications faster and easier.

Lens AppIQ– introduced today  – is a SaaS service, instantly accessible from within Lens to over 50,000 organizations now using our Kubernetes IDE. Lens AppIQ provides web-based tools to help cloud-native developers onboard, build, deploy, troubleshoot, as well as policy-manage and monitor applications for security and compliance – doing all this quite simply, enabling high focus and efficiency.

To understand how Lens AppIQ fits in the Lens Ecosystem, it helps to start by looking at Lens’ own, built-in new view, called Applications, which shows rich views of everything relevant to each running application instance in a connected cluster.

Once you connect to a cluster, you can find Applications at the top level of the menu. Click to see a list of running application instances, and click again to see relevant info, including a (pretty cool) interactive graphic map of application component relationships, as well as application metadata, events, application metrics, container logs, and so on.

Lens Applications - basic views of application structure, metadata, events, metrics, logs.

Lens Desktop – especially now with Applications – is a very powerful, simple solution for many. Lens Applications makes application-focused developers’ lives easier – letting them concentrate on building instead of platform details. However, deploying and operating those applications in a secure and compliant way that respects your organization’s governance policies can also be challenging.

Enter Lens AppIQ.

Introducing Lens AppIQ

As noted above, Lens AppIQ is a SaaS service that leverages an agent that runs on a Kubernetes cluster. The agent provides application intelligence: it interrogates configurations, maps all your applications, and reports securely on all this to the cloud service – where you and invited team members can view and work with the information. Developers can view application-centric information using Lens Applications (which presents ‘enriched’ application data when Lens AppIQ is running on a cluster) or a  browser. DevOps get additional webUI features to manage policies and deployment, or they can use a command-line interface (CLI).

Installing the agent in a connected cluster can be done from inside Lens Applications (or you can visit Lens AppIQ to create an account).

Enriched Application-Centric Views (in Lens Desktop or via the webUI)

Once Lens AppIQ’s agent is installed in your cluster, it takes a few moments to map your applications. Thereafter, Lens Applications displays your views enriched with additional information, including realtime application metrics and notice of policy violations.

Activating Lens AppIQ within a cluster provides enriched information in the Lens Applications view.

You can also visit the Lens AppIQ webUI to invite colleagues. Once they respond to invitations, team members can see similar application-centric views using a browser.

Invite users to teams and clusters with Lens AppIQ, and let them see enriched application-centric views via the Lens AppIQ webUI.

This gives teams efficient new options for organizing work by giving developers what they need to focus on building and updating applications. Lens Desktop’s Applications feature (and Lens AppIQ) give developers one, shared view for building and troubleshooting, for optimizing application performance, and for responding quickly and confidently to issues.

Policy Management, Monitoring and Alerting

Lens AppIQ allows DevOps to define, review, monitor, report on, and even enforce application policies. Simple web dialogs let you create policies identifying (for example) which registries are approved for sourcing containers, pod security, and many other parameters. Once defined, Lens AppIQ watches and immediately flags violations (and can even integrate with systems like PagerDuty and Slack to provide alerts), giving teams a line of defense against bad practices and errors, and providing a strong framework for security and compliance. Lens AppIQ can also generate reports on policy violations, as an aid to security audits and compliance due-diligence.

Lens AppIQ provides simple dialogs for setting application policies. Lens AppIQ then monitors these policies in realtime and notifies if violations occur.

Simplified Application Deployment

Finally, Lens AppIQ can integrate with authorized registries to deploy updates to pre-built container workloads with a button-press. And it can even integrate with authorized repos to build and deploy whole applications, using Cloud Native Buildpacks. Lens AppIQ can even deploy an application from bare containers – generating all the required Kubernetes objects in the process. This gives teams new options for deploying apps in standardized ways, across multiple clouds.

Lens AppIQ quickly integrates with registries and repos to (optionally build and) deploy updated containers at a button-press.

Lens AppIQ deployment includes both CVE and policy scanning during the deploy/update cycle, and can be configured to prevent execution of workloads that violate defined policies (e.g., too many CVEs). So you get rapid, simple updates to running applications, and a simple, dependable secure software supply chain.

Get Started With Lens AppIQ!

Lens AppIQ is easy to try – you can install it from right inside Lens Desktop. Mirantis is offering a Free Forever plan for individuals and small teams (up to 10 nodes, 2 Kubernetes clusters, and 2 users), and a fully-supported Pro plan for bigger organizations. You can also visit Lens AppIQ directly on the web, create an account (and get a Lens ID if you don’t already have one) and try it out that way (though now that you have a Lens ID, we also suggest you download Lens Desktop, since Lens and Lens AppIQ work so well, together). Check out the Lens AppIQ docs, here. And please let us know what you think!