What DevOps Tools Provide
DevOps monitoring tools play a crucial role in the success of engineering teams by keeping a close eye on the health and vitals of systems and applications. These tools enable developers to proactively identify and address issues before they escalate into outages or performance degradation.
Through continuous monitoring, engineers can swiftly detect problems in their early stages and take immediate action to prevent any negative impact. By closely monitoring hardware resources such as the CPU and disk space, DevOps teams gain improved visibility into the performance of these components, ensuring they are functioning optimally.
DevOps monitoring tools provide engineers with essential insights into the overall health and performance of their systems and applications. This enhanced visibility allows them to identify potential bottlenecks, resource limitations, or any other underlying issues that may affect the system’s performance or reliability.
By regularly monitoring and analyzing logs and metrics, engineering teams can quickly diagnose problems and determine the root causes of any abnormalities. This enables them to make continuous improvements and implement necessary fixes, ensuring optimal system performance.
In addition to problem detection and diagnosis, DevOps monitoring tools also facilitate collaboration and automation within engineering teams. They help create a continuous feedback loop by providing real-time data and insights, allowing for improved communication and coordination between team members.
Ultimately, the thoroughness of DevOps monitoring tools empowers engineering teams to optimize their software development process. By identifying and addressing performance, security, and cost-related issues, these tools enhance efficiency, problem-solving capabilities, and overall productivity.
1. DataDog
DataDog is a GO-based agent built on Apache Cassandra, PostgreSQL, and Kafka. It is compatible with a number of popular cloud service providers and has different integration options available including Ubuntu and Kubernetes. The dashboards can keep track of multiple metrics on a single screen, have a simple appearance, and are easy to customize. It also has multi-language support allowing Java, Python, Node, and Ruby.
2. New Relics
New Relics is geared more toward web application development. It is a Software-as-a-Service that has controls in the form of a browser add-on. It can support Python, Java, PHP, and Ruby and can be integrated with common cloud service providers. With a more web application-centric focus, it provides metrics for throughput, transaction response time, Apdex score, and the expenditure of resources on the user’s end.
3. VictorOps
VictorOps puts greater emphasis on putting out alerts when incidents occur so a team can respond faster. Its tool sets provide clear options for constructing remediation strategies in quick reaction to errors and have advanced analysis and risk evaluation functionality. Even if the damage is done, there are forensics functionality for understanding what happened and providing recommendations for preventing recurring issues. Regardless of company size, users can easily expect efficiency to increase and downtime from waiting for repairs and remediation to decrease.
4. Sentry
Sentry is an extension of Microsoft Azure DevOps but does come with integration options for either the front end or the back end. However, Sentry performs the best in front-end deployments with applications situated on the cloud or in a Kubernetes cluster. Applications on the cloud will only have monitoring data flow from the application to the Sentry server. Additionally, there are options for pre-set functions as a Software-as-a-Service program or with custom adjustments as a self-hosted addon.
5. AWS Offerings
AWS is an incredibly popular platform for building and hosting applications of various scales and functions. With how complex AWS is, Amazon does provide in-house services for DevOps teams to use. Along with simplifying DevOps with tools already designed for this cloud environment, there are also opportunities for cost savings depending on the resources used. Depending on the needs of the DevOps team, there are a number of services available.
- Amazon Cloudwatch - Cloudwatch is the more general monitoring tool not necessarily dedicated towards DevOps, but consisting of all the typical tools necessary for DevOps monitoring automatically. Especially considering the following features:
- Alarms – Alarms can be set up around certain metrics and will trigger when those thresholds are crossed. Automated reactions can be established to react to the alerts or to ignore as required.
- Logs and Insights – All active resources are tracked and the related logs can be aggregated and stored while remaining relatively simple.
- Events – Events are a near real-time stream of changes made to the system. By writing rules for what specific events to look out for, actions can then be automated to react quickly for course correction.
- Amazon EventBridge - EventBridge is designed more for bridging and controlling events and workflows between SaaS and other custom applications. This is more ideal for applications that need to work at scale and have to remain flexible and require coordination between teams.
- AWS CloudTrail - CloudTrail is a service that logs API interactions and user activity on an environment whether it is completely in the cloud or on a hybrid setup or is situated in a different AWS region. For DevOps, this would be helpful for diagnosing issues.
- Amazon DevOps Guru - This is the service more directly tailored to DevOps needs. Using machine learning, it can detect operational issues and act accordingly before these issues begin impacting customers.
Better Visibility
DevOps teams need to properly diagnose problems in order to make continuous improvements. These tools are meant to provide improved visibility on what resources need to be considered and how well they are functioning. Through improved visibility, developers can have an easier time finding problems before they worsen.
I am a recent graduate from the University of Wisconsin - Stout and am now working with AllCode as a web technician. Currently working within the marketing department.
