Summary:

Harness and Nobl9 both provide SLO management capabilities. Harness Service Reliability Management (SRM) is a SLO management module that is part of a larger software delivery (CI/CD) platform. Harness SRM is designed to facilitate greater collaboration between SREs and Developers while also automating many actions related to SLO management like governing software deployments.

Nobl9 is useful to SRE teams but does not provide automation across the software delivery lifecycle as evident in the following analysis.

SaaS & On-Premises:

Harness SRM is available as either SaaS or self-managed software that can be deployed anywhere.

Nobl9 is available via SaaS and provides an “on-prem” option that can be installed only in AWS.

Integrates with Change and Incident management sources:

Harness SRM shows deployments, Kubernetes change events, and incidents directly in context with SLO and Error budget changes. Harness allows you to drill down into these changes to determine the root cause of SLO violations.

Nobl9 has an API that allows users to add annotations to SLO charts. No further analysis is offered.

Custom Reliability Policies:

Harness SRM contains a built in policy engine based on Open Policy Agent (OPA). This enables Harness users to define and enforce custom policies with via UI or via policy-as-code. Policies within Harness can be used to send notifications or to actively manage software delivery pipelines via reliability guardrails.

Nobl9 offers the ability to create policies for notification purposes only.

Reliability Guardrails integrated with CI/CD pipelines:

Harness SRM reliability guardrail policies are used to automatically determine if deployment pipelines should proceed or stop given the status of SLOs an Error Budgets. This makes it possible to effectively standardize and scale the management of pipelines via SLO management processes.

Nobl9 does not offer this capability.

Service Health Indicators:

Harness SRM can determine and display the health of application services using SLOs and/or metrics to derive the overall health. By using a combination of SLOs and metrics, Harness can provide a more precise calculation of service health.

Nobl9 can determine and display the health of application services using SLOs only.

Service Reliability Checks:

Harness SRM can determine the health of services across all stages of software delivery by using a combination of AI/ML techniques on logs and metrics and through error tracking. These capabilities make it possible for developers to proactively improve the quality and reliability of their application services before deploying to production.

Nobl9 does not offer service reliability checks.

Automated Deployment Verification and Rollback (Continuous Verification):

Continuous Verification is the process of monitoring your app for abnormalities after a deployment. For example, Continuous Verification could catch a latency issue or 5xx errors and automatically roll back your app to the previous version. The idea is to catch errors as quickly as possible – ideally, before customers notice – and make a seamless transition back to the prior version.

Harness provides Continuous Verification out of the box, effectively reducing risk and reputational damage from downtime. Harness supports many vendors, including Prometheus, Datadog, AppDynamics, New Relic, StackDriver, CloudWatch, and custom monitoring and observability tools.

Nobl9 does not offer this capability.

Correlation of Change Events to Service Health:

Harness SRM ingests change events and shows them on a timeline that is aligned with SLO and Error Budget charts. The user can select and drill down into specific timeframes to perform root cause analysis on the impacted SLOs.

Nobl9 offers the ability to annotate change events on SLO charts but does not offer any further drill down or analysis.

Correlation of Incidents to Service Health:

Harness SRM ingests incident events and shows them on a timeline that is aligned with SLO and Error Budget charts. The user can select and drill down into specific timeframes to perform root cause analysis on the impacted SLOs.

Nobl9 offers the ability to annotate incident events on SLO charts but does not offer any further drill down or analysis.

Error Tracking:

Harness SRM is capable of detecting all run-time exceptions within Java applications and providing detailed debugging information so that developers can resolve problematic exceptions before they deploy to production. This improves the quality of software which also improves reliability over time.

Nobl9 does not offer error tracking capabilities.

Reliability Audit Trails:

Harness SRM keeps detailed audit logs of all activities including creating, editing, and deleting of SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets. This is in addition to the standard audit trails included with the Harness platform.

Nobl9 does not offer audit trails.

Unified Software Delivery Platform:

Harness SRM is the SLO management module of the Harness Software Delivery Platform. Each module can be used standalone (integrated as a best of breed solution to a DevOps toolchain) or as part of the platform. When used as part of the platform, each module passes meta-data and can provide greater levels of automation than if used standalone.

Nobl9 does not offer a unified software delivery platform.

*Please note: Our competitors, just like us, release updates to their products on a regular cadence. We keep these pages updated to the best of our ability, but there are bound to be discrepancies. For the most up-to-date information on competitor features, browsing the competitor’s new release pages and communities are your best bet.

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