Top 10 DevOps Monitoring Tools

Introduction

Before Knowing about DevOps Monitoring tools, Let's have an introductory note to DevOps.

DevOps is the new culture and methodology with several benefits and it shapes the change in the organization by combining development and operations. DevOps consists of continuous development, continuous testing, configuration management, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring. In this article, we will discuss what is continuous monitoring, what are its benefits, why it is required, and the top 10 DevOps monitoring tools. 

Before we go there we need to know what DevOps life cycle management consists of. DevOps Life Cycle Management consists of phases that include plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, and monitor. As you see, the monitoring is one of the important parts of DevOps life cycle management. To achieve the DevOps Life Cycle Management there are lot of tools for each of the phases. We will be discussing the top 10 DevOps tools for monitoring in this article.

What is DevOps monitoring?

DevOps monitoring is monitoring the applications, network, servers, and other digital assets for performance, health, user transactions, security, loads, bugs, alerts, errors and helps to ensure their smooth functioning. The proactive monitoring helps in monitoring the digital assets in a way that simulates the real user’s environment on the assets. This helps to know the errors and other parameters beforehand in a pre-production environment even before going live. 

The organization also monitors the digital assets in the production environment to figure out the issues and problems that may affect the users accessing the digital assets. Implementing the monitoring tools in the DevOps environment acts as an early warning system that provides us with sufficient time to rectify or correct the awkward situation. In the traditional environment, the monitoring tools were deployed in the late stages of the SDLC that is in the production environment, however, in the DevOps life cycle management, the monitoring tools are used to find out the deviance early in the cycle at planning and development stage itself.

Benefits of DevOps monitoring tools

Some of the goals of DevOps monitoring is to shift left in the DevOps life cycle and do monitoring at the development stage itself. This along with proactive monitoring helps to find the defects and deviance at the early stage itself. The 3 things that monitoring is needed in the early stages are as follows, 

Reuse – Create new monitors instantly by reusing the AlertSite's OpenAPI, Selenium scripts, and Soap UI test cases. This will have the following benefits; it saves efforts, time, and money. Reusing assets also supports consistency and standardization across the organization in multiple departments.

Monitor during the pre-production – When you are developing the test cases use the monitors along with the test cases to start the monitoring earlier. This helps a lot in pre-production by identifying the issues earlier.

Use REST API's – The AletSite's REST API can be used to create the monitors at the build and deployment stages.

Monitoring in the Pre-production – This helps to find out issues early and make the changes early even before going into production. It also helps in such a way that the new changes in the production will not destroy the monitors in the production environment. It also gives the information or insight into the test environment itself.

The monitoring tools in the DevOps environment helps in 4 ways to collaborate, automate, configure, and share. Monitoring early in the environment helps to work collaboratively with other team members. By nature, the pre-production environment is an automated process and helps reduces efforts manually and reduces error-prone routine jobs. Configuring the monitor’s scripts helps in reusing and reducing errors. By sharing the information among the different departments of the DevOps life cycle helps to enhance the DevOps culture and its benefits.

DevOps Certification

Training Course

100% Placement Guarantee

View course

 

Top 10 monitoring tools in DevOps

1. Librato – We can manage and monitor the cloud on a real-time basis. It uses metrics to monitor different components of the cloud. It provides the solution to visualize, analyze, and to receive the alerts based on the metrics.

Advantages,

• Ability to monitor and manage the cloud components with the help of metrics
• Provides visualization on the monitor data.
• Can notify upon completion of the tasks.
• There is no installation required
• Very simple to use interface
• Alerts contain less false positives.

2. Sensu - It is an infrastructure and application monitoring tool. It can measure and monitor the service health, business KPI's, infrastructure, and application health.

Advantages

• It can send notifications and alerts
• Able to dynamically de-register and register the clients.
• All types of applications and multi-tiered networks
• Can use the automation in this tool

3. Nagios - It is the servers and network monitoring tool which monitors the source code modification, peer review and version iterations, etc. It can monitor any network devices. It can monitor SMTP, POP, Proxy, IMAP and HTTP on the servers with 24 * 7 monitoring environment

Advantages,

• Web-based interface for the dashboard
• Plugins can be added
• Can monitor both client and server sides
• Can be used to monitor production environments
• Excellent libraries and add-on can be provided.
• Can monitor the maintenance and downtime

4. Datical Deployment Monitoring Console - It is a software application for managing and monitoring the databases to eliminate human errors and manage the SQL script execution.

Advantages

• It audits, tracks and solves the database deployment issues automatically
• Removes the errors
• Database auditing becomes easier
• Offers all information related to deployment

5. Splunk - This is used in monitoring and analyzing the machine data and analyzes the logs of all the systems. It is used in the production data centers. It uses a powerful user-friendly interface on analyzing the logs.

Advantages,

• Easy to use
• Ability to analyze the applications, servers, networks, and logs from various other sources.
• Deployment is possible in the production environment
• It can give excellent analytic data from the alerts and logs
•  
• 6. PagerDuty - Used for the operations team, has the ability to on-call scheduling, alert monitoring, incident monitoring, and automated escalation tool.

Advantages are,

• User friendly and easier to automate and configure the tool
• Has the ability to auto-escalate the incidents
• Easy operations tool with powerful GUI.

7. Prometheus - It is made for white-box monitoring and uses the metrics based time series database tool. It is also a very good alerting tool

Advantages,

• Used for micro-services monitoring
• Can be integrated with the PagerDuty.
• Can collect the organization's time-series data
• Can be used for web API custom development

8. Tasktop Integration Hub - It is a software delivery integration tool. 

Advantages,

• Ability to integrate over 45 tools
• Ability to add any new tool quickly
• Ability to have specific field updates
• Securely connect with the web-based interface
• Able to detect the changes on other tools and limit the loads

9. Dynatrace - It is the smallest tool on the server which is just 10 MB and has fewer overheads and can monitor the application logs. There is no need to restart the application when the Dynatrace is installed. It is automated and uses Artificial Intelligence to power itself.

Advantages,

• Ability to trace the transaction flow
• Identifies the errors in the production workflow.
• It uses the baseline metrics to trace the deviance.
• The abnormal change in the application and networks are alerted.
• Monitors the application performance

10. Kibana – Is used for visualization and analytics. This is designed to be used with elasticsearch and has a web interface for dynamic dashboards. Can display changes to elasticsearch queries in real-time.

Advantages,

• Easy to operate and simple to set up
• It is an open source tool
• The search field feature is pretty good
• Any amount of logs can be analyzed for visualization
• Can also show the statistics of the logs

Final thoughts 

Now that you know the benefits of DevOps monitoring tools and brief input about a few tools, it’s time to explore more in detail about the same. Hence we recommend that you take up the course in DevOps Training at StarAgile, which covers the monitoring tools in DevOps in detail.