As businesses expand and IT infrastructure evolves, the traditional layered O&M model is no longer sufficient to describe the complex O&M scenarios within enterprises. Beyond the operating system layer, component layer, and hardware layer, Cloud-Native, PaaS-layer, and other O&M scenarios continue to emerge, giving rise to a variety of complex monitoring scenarios—with container monitoring as a prime example. Compared to traditional monitoring, these scenarios involve numerous targets, rapid changes, non-unique instances, and other volatile factors that significantly increase the difficulty of enterprise monitoring and O&M. Against this backdrop, the demand for a unified monitoring platform capable of covering all monitoring scenarios has gradually become the central focus of monitoring initiatives across enterprises.
To address these challenges, a major financial enterprise adopted the CanWay BlueWhale Full-Stack Observability Center as its foundation and launched an infrastructure monitoring system construction project. By reshaping its O&M framework and building a unified, integrated monitoring platform, the enterprise comprehensively elevated its monitoring and management capabilities, improved IT O&M efficiency, and established robust support for the safe, continuous, and uninterrupted operation of its IT systems.
01 Background
Over the years of monitoring operations, this enterprise had explored monitoring models and metric frameworks for various scenarios entirely on its own—resulting in a lack of best practices for OS-layer and component-layer monitoring. For the hardware layer, only Zabbix-based SNMP Trap collection had been implemented. On the container side, monitoring was completely absent. Filling these monitoring capability gaps represents the customer's most critical development priority.
02 Pain Point Analysis
Following its Cloud-Native transformation, the enterprise's monitoring and O&M targets underwent dramatic changes. Building an integrated monitoring platform spanning both cloud and on-premises environments presented numerous challenges, primarily in the following areas:
Component Monitoring: The existing monitoring system provided overly simplistic component monitoring. Not only did multiple components lack monitoring methods, but even monitored components lacked core metric collection and policy templates—administrators were unclear on how to configure monitoring properly.
Container Monitoring: Container monitoring capabilities were entirely absent. Container resources and containerized component services were completely unmonitored, posing extremely high risks to system reliability.
Hardware Monitoring: The legacy hardware monitoring system only supported SNMP Trap-based reporting for target monitoring. When devices actually went offline, effective alerts often failed to trigger, and monitoring capabilities severely lacked extensibility.
Business System Metric Monitoring: Various business systems within the enterprise had independently collected a batch of metrics via Prometheus to serve their own business needs. These metrics currently lacked any unified management approach or standards.
03 Solution
Basic Monitoring — Powerful and Proven Collection Extensibility
The CanWay BlueWhale Full-Stack Observability Center employs an Agent + Plugins design pattern, supporting rapid extension of monitoring coverage through system scripts, SQL queries, Exporters, Datadog plugins, and more—resolving the challenge of collecting monitoring data for diverse component objects under the Agent model.
Building on these approaches, the Observability Center has also accumulated a substantial library of standardized built-in plugins, covering the vast majority of mainstream databases and middleware. It also features a mature metric framework, providing this enterprise with best-practice configuration templates to guide users through monitoring setup.
Container Monitoring — Comprehensive Coverage of Container Resources and Service Metrics for Full-Stack Monitoring
Based on an optimized implementation of the Kubernetes-native Prometheus monitoring approach, the enterprise achieved container monitoring across the following scenarios:
Automatic discovery of various resource objects within containers, with collection of related performance metrics including Cluster, Workload, Pod, Container, and Node.
Monitoring of component services deployed on containers, with data collection via the following methods:
-ServiceMonitor (recommended) and PodMonitor
-Sidecar approach (deploying an exporter scraper as a sidecar to expose metrics, combined with ServiceMonitor for collection)
-Centralized remote collection (for components that natively expose /metrics endpoints, combined with ServiceMonitor for collection)
Additionally, we provided this enterprise with container monitoring best-practice guidance, helping them build container monitoring capabilities even when starting from a position of limited container monitoring knowledge.
Hardware Monitoring — No Development Required, Online SNMP Plugin Creation
The CanWay BlueWhale Full-Stack Observability Center offers online SNMP plugin creation. As long as the MIB library or OIDs for the target devices are available, SNMP collection plugins can be defined within the product interface—either manually or via tool-generated definitions. Active polling-based monitoring ensures that anomaly alerts are generated when devices go offline.
Furthermore, we provided this enterprise with hardware monitoring best-practice guidance and detailed OID lists, offering hands-on instruction for hardware monitoring setup.
Prometheus Data Integration — Effortless Exporter Interface Connection, No Development Required
The BK-Pull plugin protocol within the CanWay BlueWhale Full-Stack Observability Center supports direct connection to existing Exporter data interfaces. By simply filling in the URL and other parameters, data can be brought under management immediately.
04 Results Showcase
Component Monitoring — Core Database and Middleware Monitoring Integration with Policy Configuration
MySQL data dashboard
Kafka data dashboard
Container Monitoring — K8s Container Management Platform Monitoring Integration
Container resource discovery and display list
Container resource performance metrics
In-cluster ServiceMonitor and PodMonitor
Container component service metrics
Hardware Monitoring — Built-In Mainstream Hardware Plugins, Easy Adaptation for New Models
Built-in mainstream hardware plugins
05 Implementation Outcomes
06 Scenario Applicability
The CanWay BlueWhale Full-Stack Observability Center has developed comprehensive monitoring solutions and best-practice guidance across all O&M layer scenarios, helping enterprises maximize monitoring coverage. It also provides mature monitoring data integration solutions that enable seamless data exchange with third-party monitoring systems while delivering a fully consistent experience across data processing, storage, and visualization. This solution is applicable to the following types of enterprises:
Enterprises with non-standardized monitoring onboarding, where individual business systems operate independently and the monitoring framework lacks unified governance.
Enterprises that have implemented basic monitoring collection but lack effective metric framework development, with non-standardized Monitoring and Alerting configurations.
Enterprises lacking container monitoring capabilities that seek to fill gaps in their container monitoring scenarios.
Enterprises with insufficient hardware monitoring capabilities and difficult device adaptation that seek to build out their network monitoring and hardware monitoring capacity through a comprehensive IT monitoring platform.
